


see me fly

by sapphee



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Asian American Characters, Chinese American, Chinese American Characters, Diaspora Feels, F/M, Family, Gen, Identity, Microaggressions, Racism, bc i didn't want to disappoint ppl looking for saving face fic, but chris' aunts are from saving face (2004), cantonese, didn't want to tag this w/ saving face
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-14
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-01-17 10:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12363711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphee/pseuds/sapphee
Summary: He’s in a different world with different rules now.[a look at Chris Chow’s four years at Samwell]





	1. 老鼠爱大米 (mouse loves rice)

**Author's Note:**

> this is a fic i've been writing since january 2017 but it is very, very difficult. i don't know if the other chapters looking at the other three years of college will be that long bc going in, i just knew that i had a lot to say about his first year, which is heavily drawn from my own experiences at college (i'm in the same year as lardo, ransom, and holster, so now that they're finally graduating for real in the comic... i feel like i've finally also graduated for real, even though that happened about 1.5 years ago already). idk if i have as much to say for the rest of his four years, but we'll see. this is jsyk in advance why the word count for each chapter may be so lopsided. 
> 
> chris chow and i come from very similar backgrounds (both canto chinese american, from cities w/ big populations of people of chinese descent, went to small liberal arts colleges in massachusetts), tho he's second-gen to be born in the US, whereas i'm first-gen to be born in the US, so while i drew from my experiences, i thought about how he'd react placed in the situations i was in and how that'd be different from how i experience it (the starting point i always use when i project my #diaspora angst onto him)
> 
> there is a soundtrack for this fic [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtStoH71eEUs0kTinHoW7fyZBtprpFWre)! it has four canto/mando songs in it, all of which were songs i grew up with. each song is paired with one of chris' years in college/a chapter. this [link](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/166404846969/see-me-fly-soundtrack-for-my-fic-of-the-same) has a list of english translations for each song. the playlist has 9 songs--#1, 2, 4, and 5 are the versions i grew up with (#1 was orig sung by yang chengang, but the one sung by twins in this playlist is the one i grew up w/); #3 is an english song for the interlude; #6-10 are english versions of the songs; there's an extra english version for "the moon represents my heart" because stephanie chou's is my favorite version of it, whose live performance i stumbled upon a few years ago. she's super talented so go check her out! oh, and if you like this fic, could you please reblog that link?? thank you so much!!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home is now more a feeling than a physical location, but that only means that it hurts more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (warning for some internalized racism where chris+his dad are talking about outlets & chris thinks something racist about his dad + other microaggressions)
> 
> (builds off [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/153604759059/seeing-as-chowders-family-is-from-hk-and) \+ [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/153806271199/chowder-hc-early-days-at-samwell))
> 
> i have a lot of footnotes/commentary for this that you can totally ignore (ctrl+F 'chapter 1 notes' if you want to read them; they're at the end of the fic bc i keep exceeding character limits in the notes sections, which are the absolute bane of my existence); they're just for me to remember for later, bc as of the day i'm posting this, i've only written one chapter of it, and it's a doozy. 5k! wow! what am i doing!!! 
> 
> p.s. thanks to [yun](http://chrisfranklinchow.tumblr.com) for helping me translate the stuff wil's ma says in mando bc i'm a lost cause

In theory, road trips are never-ending green peripheries and Cantonese-language radio or nonstop marathons of 90s Cantopop CDs a familiar, pleasant hum in the background—the sound of home when they’re away.

In theory, road trips are naps filled with surreal fears-turned-realities that dissipate in the stuffy hot air, no match for the interior of a car with a broken air conditioner that Mom and Dad have had since getting married and keep forgetting to replace.

In theory, road trips are lukewarm hamburgers in flimsy wrappers from McDonald’s that they always get when they arrive at rest stops along the highway, because Chris and Kay never eat Chinese food while on the road if they can help it—Chinese fast food is just no match for what they eat at home every day—and road trips are the one time that Mom and Dad are too tired to argue with them about it, eaten in the car because more often than not, they’re the only Asians at the rest stop, and it just feels too weird to stay any longer than they have to.

In _practice_ , their current road trip has none of that; the view from the window contains rustic cottages and not rows and rows of trees, a local English-language radio station is rambling about the weather, and the inside of the car is cool because it’s a rental Dad got as soon as they left Logan Airport. Even though the radio gives traffic updates from time to time, Mom is rattling those to Dad off Waze for the first time. At least Kay still snores on his shoulder.

Chris has _never_ listened to English-language radio on family car trips before; Mom and Dad are first-generation Chinese American and saddled with an ever-present diaspora angst that manifests itself in their car’s overflowing collection of their grandparents’-turned-parents’ favorite Cantopop songs, even though Chris, Kay, and his parents know very few of those songs by name. Even though this day’s been coming for months, Chris has a feeling that he’s only now realizing the implications of attending Samwell—Massachusetts is completely foreign territory to him.

It’s jarring, to say the least.

Completely unsettling and will never go away, he will learn later, to say the most.

—

Chris moves in without much fanfare, except for one embarrassing moment when Dad asks the residential director of the dorm if there are more outlets in the small triple for Chris and his two white roommates.

“Why would there be more outlets?” Chris asks, scrubbing a hand across his face. “It’s not like they can instantly add more just because you asked.”

“Two outlets for three roommates is not enough.” Dad starts typing on his phone. “When _I_ was here, rooms like these used to be doubles. That’s—”

“—why there are only two outlets. I know. It’s just—whatever.”

“What?”

Chris sighs. “Asking that made you look like—like you’re, you know.” _Like an unassimilated, rich, pushy, fobby Asian foreigner who doesn’t know how America works_ , he thinks, and immediately hates himself for it.

“No, I don’t know. What do you want to eat for dinner before we have to go?”

“I don’t know. How about—Is there—Didn’t you—.” Chris clears his throat, ignoring Kay’s giggle. He doesn’t know why it’s so hard to get words out of his mouth. “I think I remember you said there was a Chinese restaurant you’d take your parents to, whenever they visited?”

Kay gives him an incredulous look laced with betrayal. “ _You_ want to eat _Chinese_ food?”

Dad puts a hand on Chris’ shoulder and laughs. “Lay off him, will you? Chris is probably realizing just now that he won’t be able to eat Chinese food as often anymore.”

Chris can’t speak.

Mom then comes back from the restroom, shaking her hands dry. Some of the droplets land on Chris’ arm, startling him. “We done here? Where do you want to eat?”

“Chris wanted Chinese food,” Dad says, when Chris doesn’t say anything. “He wanted to see the place we used to take our parents all the time. Lucky Moon, I think?”

“Oh yeah, my mom was always complaining that their food’s too salty,” Mom says. She frowns. “But I’m pretty sure they closed down a few years ago. There was a whole thing about it in the Asian Samwell Alums Facebook group, don’t you remember?”

“There’s one called Wok and Key in Newton, apparently,” Kay says. “According to Yelp. Four-point-one stars, two dollar signs. Want to go?”

“I wonder if this was the one that Julie’s aunt was talking about,” Mom says. “Why doesn’t Yelp ever have the restaurant’s Chinese name on there? Then I’d know for sure.”

“They have a picture of the restaurant’s front on there, but there’s no close-up. I don’t even think it has a Chinese name.” Kay squints at her phone. “Oh no, I was wrong. They _do_ have a Chinese name, but I don’t know if you can see it…”

Mom comes over, leaning in. “Let me see.”

Dad looks at his watch. “It’s almost six-thirty. So should we go there, then? When do you need to be back for the dorm meeting?”

“Eight-thirty,” Chris manages to croak out.

“We’re about twenty minutes from Newton, so if we leave now, we don’t have to rush dinner too much, _and_ we can get to the airport a little earlier. Alright, let’s go.”

—

It just _figures_ that the one element of Chow family road trips that remains constant would be their family being the only Asians in the restaurant. Well, other than the waiters. Wok and Key looks nothing like the restaurants he would yumcha in—Wok and Key looks super fancy and modern. All the tables are rectangular—no big round one to fit a dozen family members in sight—and the tables are set with _forks and knives_. No Lazy Susans, either.

When Chris opens the menu, he’s immediately disoriented, even though he understands every single word in it. But that’s the thing—he’s not supposed to. He’s only supposed to understand half of it, because the other half should be in Chinese. He’s only supposed to point to the English to indicate what he feels like eating and then ask his parents to confirm it’s what he thinks it is, because he can’t read Chinese and doesn’t know the English words for the foods he likes, but he recognizes the Cantonese words for them. He’s only supposed to amusedly watch Mom refuse Dad’s help in reading the Chinese part of the menu and painstakingly replicate each character stroke into Pleco to identify the characters she doesn’t recognize.

He’s not supposed to completely understand the menu of a Chinese restaurant in its entirety and yet still feel so overwhelmingly lost at the same time.

Chris forces himself to snap out of it. This is ridiculous. The anxiety of going to a new school, of moving away, of living across the country from home, is getting to him.

Still, he’s immensely relieved that Mom is apparently going through the same existential crisis, because she waves a waiter down for a Chinese menu.

Unfortunately, Chris’ relief evaporates when the waiter wordlessly pulls out a battered, worn piece of paper from his shirt pocket. He unfolds it, placing it in front of Mom, and walks away. Forks and knives, fancy English-only menus, Chinese translations only available by request and on old paper. What’s next?

The answer to that turns out to be disposable chopsticks, the kind he’d get from Chinese takeout, if their family ever ordered Chinese takeout (“What’s the point of buying Chinese food when I can just make it?” Popo says to a nine-year-old Chris in Cantonese, patting him on the head as she watches him eat. “It’s all got MSG, anyway. Especially the soup. Never forget—no drinking soup not made at home”).

Wok and Key is pretty busy; when Dad asks, their waiter has barely pulled out four pairs of disposable chopsticks from his apron pocket before he’s already walking toward another table, and even though Chris has never felt a particular way about chopsticks, which have always just been a thing he could always count on _being there_ , this feels like a slap in the face, a splash of cold water that’s woken him up and finally gotten him to understand that he’s in a different world with different rules now.

Wonton noodles will always be his favorite comfort food, but these are easily the worst he’s eaten. They taste fine, but the disposable chopsticks are lighter than what he’s used to holding, and the muscle memory in his hand prompting comparisons between these chopsticks and the weight of the ones he’s more familiar with is so distracting that he fails to stab his wonton with a chopstick a dozen times. Finally, he gives up and grabs the fork instead, feeling like he’s lost something, though he doesn’t know what. Or to whom.

—

Dad is able to drop Chris back at his dorm forty-five minutes before the dorm meeting. They rush their goodbyes in the lobby; Dad is eager to take advantage of the extra time to beat the traffic to the airport.

Kay takes one last look around, her eyes studying the cozy furniture. “It’s not bad. Bet you ten bucks you’re going to be calling home and begging to come back after a week because you can’t deal with having white people food all day, every day.”

Chris scoffs. “As _if_. You think I’m going to hate them for serving pizza _every day_?”

“No,” Kay admits wistfully. “ _I_ want pizza every day.”

“You better not just be eating pizza,” Mom warns. “You’re an athlete, you need to have protein or whatever. Also, I said the same thing to my parents, and I ended up eating my own words when I found out that it is, in fact, possible to get sick of pizza.”

Chris gives Mom a hug, towering over her. “Sure, Mom.”

“Oh, I’m so excited for you! You get to experience the place where we had some of the best years of our lives for yourself!” Mom hugs him tighter, which is definitely not a Thing that happens in their family, unless the situation is really dire, which Chris supposes it is, in a way. “But get prepared to miss rice. Especially because you were born in the Year of the Rat.”

Chris looks at her, confused.

“You know, like [that song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEbOlBd4a9Y&index=1&list=PLtStoH71eEUs0kTinHoW7fyZBtprpFWre)?”

He rolls his eyes, unable to suppress his embarrassed smile when she starts humming a little bit of it, because if she goes on long enough, Kay will bring up Chris’ enthusiastic rendition of it in a home video made when he was four. “Rats and mice aren’t the same, Mom.”

She sighs, lets him go, and ruffles his hair. “They all still love rice, though. Like I you.”

Face burning, Chris walks over to Dad, hand on the back of his neck. “Hey, sorry about earlier—”

Dad waves him off. “No harm done. It’s been a long day.”

“No kidding. But really, sorry I,” Chris swallows, trying to contain the irrational panic suddenly throwing itself against his ribcage in an attempt to get out. Why does he suddenly feel like he’s never going to see them again, that Dad’s last memory of Chris will be of Chris snapping at him if Chris doesn’t address it right now? That’s ridiculous. “I didn’t mean to snap at you earlier. When we’d just gotten into the room and you were asking the RD about the outlets. I’m sorry. I’m just a little stressed out.”

Dad gives him a look. Chris tamps down his anxiety the best he can, and finally, Dad stops scrutinizing him, throwing his arms around him. Fuck, with all these hugs going around, Chris feels like he might as well be dying or something. “Apology accepted. I’m… proud of you. I can’t wait to see what you get up to here.”

Chris shrugs, in a way that he hopes to convey as modesty or (better yet) apathy and not arrogance. “Can’t wait to start.” At least the redness on his face is real, even if it’s laced with his anxious thoughts, not with enthusiasm.

Chris continues waving in the direction of their rental long after it’s driven away.

—

Both of his new roommates, Nate and Brandon, are white. Brandon asks straight off why Chris is wearing “shower shoes” if he’s not about to shower. It takes Chris about two seconds to realize that Brandon is referring to his slippers, which he’s always been able to wear without comment. He refrains from saying anything about the mud Brandon’s tracked in from running into The Pond to get a shot of a Canadian goose just about to land in the water or the stench that overtook the room in the half-hour Brandon left his boots fermenting during the dorm-wide meeting with the RD.

Nate asks Chris where he’s from. Chris is going to learn after a few days here that that’s the first thing everyone wants to know, even before his name.

He gets nicknamed ‘Chowder’ by the hockey team. Soup is a big thing in Cantonese culture and has always been a mainstay in their home, but chowder is not one of those soups. When he calls home, which he can’t do often because he’s too afraid of losing his composure, he tells Mama when she asks about college, “I always thought you were supposed to drink soup. But here, white people like to _eat_ it.”

It does the trick; Mama laughs and doesn’t ask if he misses home or how he’s doing in Chinese class. Even though he’s enrolled in the easiest class, his Chinese professor keeps expecting more of him than his non-Chinese classmates, _even though he doesn’t actually know any Chinese other than the Cantonese he grew up hearing at home._

He misses rice a _lot_. He hates the rice at Samwell.

He hears the snickers and feel the confused looks around him whenever Wei Laoshi calls on him and it always takes him a second to react, because shouldn’t he be the best in the class? Shouldn’t he know his own name? He’s just not used to hearing his Chinese name in Mandarin, that’s all. But it seems like the assumptions his older relatives always make are universal—everyone in this classroom, and indeed, everyone he’s met here, seems to think he’s in touch with ‘his’ culture (but if he was, why would he even be taking this class?). ‘His’ being Chinese. Mandarin, really.

His Chinese tutor Brian, an international student from Beijing, asks Chris if he’s Korean after Chris struggles to pronounce a word made up of two third-tone characters for an embarrassing half-minute.

“No,” Chris says. He can recite this in his sleep, at this point. “I was born here, and I speak Cantonese at home.”

“You shouldn’t have too much trouble then—they’re fairly similar.”

Not similar enough, Chris thinks. And because it’s been on his mind lately, not that he—or Brian—recognizes enough Cantonese to know.

—

When Chris lands in California for winter break, all he can do is exhale a soft huff, a disbelieving laugh. The air quality at Samwell is superb, very clean, but it’s only as he’s breathing in the smell of Mama’s dumplings being fried in a pan at home that he feels like he’s started breathing again, after months of just trying not to suffocate.

Soup and rice, things that have always been staples in his diet and that he’s always despised, he now eats enthusiastically. Once the joy of reorienting himself with home passes, though, he spends the rest of the month dreading the day he has to go back.

The only thing, though, is that after a semester of filling his head and ears with Mandarin, he decides to spend winter break practicing speaking in Cantonese, but finds himself starting sentences with Mandarin or slipping into Mandarin when he doesn’t know how to say it in Cantonese. His grandparents are proud—to them, knowing Mandarin is the key to success in getting more business opportunities—but he just feels like a failure. He’s always despaired only being able to say things in English, but now he’s still saying things in the wrong language.

He also musters up the courage to ask the girl he went to Winter Screw with to officially be his girlfriend—they’ve hung out quite often during the whole semester, and he likes her a lot. She says yes.

Then he musters up some more to ignore all the whispers around him asking why a pretty white girl like Caitlin would go for an Asian guy when they get back.

—

Chris’ Chinese class starts spring semester off with a discussion of Lunar New Year. The chapter they’re reading goes through foods and traditions. Chris has never heard of some of them or just possibly hadn’t noticed—is _that_  why Mom’s always frantically getting Chris and Kay to clean their rooms before it?—and can think of some things his family does that aren’t in the book, probably due to regional variations, but only vaguely, which is why he is caught off guard when Wei Laoshi calls on him to talk about his family’s Lunar New Year traditions.

He stumbles through talking about Yun-Yut, ‘everyone’s birthday,’ a day on which his family always eats chicken to celebrate it. At least he doesn’t mix up the Cantonese and Mandarin for the words ‘and’ and ‘but’ when he’s put on the spot anymore.

Wei Laoshi cocks her head, fascinated. As if to say, _How quaint._ “I’ve never heard of that. That’s very interesting,” she replies politely in Mandarin, before moving on with the lesson.

Chris has never felt so quickly—so _efficiently_ —stripped of his legitimacy as a person of Chinese descent before. His cheeks burn a deep red as he looks down at his lap. He can feel everyone’s eyes on him, how they’re all wondering about whether the thing he just described is actually true. Constantly being told one thing by his _Integrated Chinese_ textbook and recalling differently from his own memories, he’s starting to wonder, too. Are the things that his family does differently from what the textbook says about Chinese culture different just because they’re Cantonese and the textbook isn’t? Or are they just doing it all wrong?

As soon as Chinese class ends, instead of his previously planned cram session in the library to kill time before the Samwell Chinese Students Association’s annual Lunar New Year dinner, Chris finds his feet running for the Peter Pan bus that’ll take them to Cambridge, where he can get on the T to Boston, before even his mind realizes where he’s going.

—

He gets lost twice, and all the restaurants are full, but he doesn’t care. He’s finally made it to Boston’s Chinatown, and even though it’s so cold that the air he inhales pierces his lungs, he lets out the same disbelieving laugh as he did back when he had just landed in California for winter break after his first flight by himself and gulps more of the icy air greedily. Around him, the sidewalks are alive with people huddled together, glove-clad hands filled with bread from Chinese bakeries, children throwing cherry bombs at the ground and picking them back up to try again when they don’t explode on the snowy cement, as they all wait for tables at the overfilled restaurants to open up.

Chris hears parents chiding their children in Cantonese, sees lines of people waiting to buy bread from the bakeries to tide them over for dinner that go out the door, and smells the cigarette smoke of people who’ve been waiting for quite a while. Children are joyously playing, and the adults are energetically catching each other up on their lives, but the underlying energy is forced stillness, impatience, anticipation. Waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

He spots Brian at a table of four with his friends; they’re sitting right by the window. Suddenly, it makes him wish he’d had more of an inclination to go to dimsum with his friends back home, instead of opting for other options, because even though Brian and his friends look nothing like Chris or his parents, Chris can see it—a past where his parents would go have dimsum with their friends even though they openly admitted to finding it boring and annoying when they were younger; a future where Chris will also go out for dimsum and have good-natured banter with the waiter about being an ABC who doesn’t remember the names of the dishes he loves but can describe them in Chinglish and the waiter will snark back with the names and wistfully say that they wish their kids liked Chinese food as much as Chris does.

He buys a hot dog bun after waiting about half an hour and stands at a street corner as he bites into it, the sweet and salty flavors warming him as if he’d gotten Horlicks instead. He pretends he’s not listening in when a waitress from the closest restaurant comes out, clad only in her uniform but paying no mind to the cold, and wishes her daughter (Jenny, a senior at Wellesley, she’d wanted to leave campus to go home today, but she has a paper due) a Happy Lunar New Year in Cantonese. Chris knows Jenny says it back in English because her mom responds chidingly, “Say it properly!” with a fond smile on her face.

Cars are double-parked along the sidewalk, and the streets are narrow; the early diners may have beaten the rest of them to the food, but it’ll be a long time yet before they can get to their cars and go home.

Home. Boston’s Chinatown is tiny and ever-shrinking (thanks, gentrification), with fewer supermarkets and restaurants and streets than San Francisco’s Chinatown, but the sounds of Cantonese are all around him, are the _same._ At least, it evokes the same emotions from him—like it’s been for his whole life, he can’t understand all the Cantonese being uttered, but he feels… settled. Settled in a way he never felt in his Chinese class, struggling to stay afloat in a sea of his classmates’ haltingly pronounced Mandarin. It’s weird—like his chopsticks and slippers, Cantonese has just always _been there_ , part of the backdrop of his life, but hearing it all around him now makes his heart yearn but also sing at the same time. Cantonese phonemes sound like music; they _are_ music.

Home is a lot more flexible of a concept than he’d previously thought, Chris realizes. He looks around once more, reluctantly steeling himself for the commute back to Samwell—a brisk walk to the T, then back to Cambridge, where he’ll wait outside the Harvard gates for the Peter Pan bus to take him back. With the restaurants so full, he’d probably have to wait at least two more hours before he could get a table, but he doubts he’d be able to be seated alone. Chances are, he’d have to be seated with another family, and that’d just be awkward for everyone. Still, every step away feels like a slice through his heart, worse than the cold air piercing his lungs with every breath. At least he’d already cleaned his room last week in preparation for Lunar New Year; at least he was able to do one thing properly.

> Where’d you go? I looked for you after your class ended but didn’t see you???
> 
> nowhere. just had to leave campus for an errand i’ll be back soon
> 
> Better be, or I’m eating your slice of bitty’s pie too :)
> 
> CAIT

Home is now more a feeling than a physical location, but that only means that it hurts more.

—

Spring break is ten days long, but it’s still not long enough for him to justify a flight back home, which is when Mom tells him that her cousin Wil in NYC has just finished moving into her new apartment with her wife Vivian. Chris hasn’t seen them in forever, not since probably middle school, though he knows Kay and Wil’s half-sister Lily found each other on Facebook a few years ago and have been pen pals since.

After a brief phone call in which he manages to avoid calling Aunt Wil or Aunt Vivian by name because that’s just too weird, he books a bus ticket to NYC with Nursey, who’s also headed to NYC. They spend the four-turned-five-hour-long bus ride napping on each other’s shoulders, which isn’t much different from a roadie, except that he’s not going to wonder if the opposing team just whispered a word that rhymes with ‘drink’ as they were passing him (again)—though he should still probably expect something like that to happen. He’d just heard it as he was boarding the bus at South Station and jostled someone by accident; NYC and Boston aren’t too different after all.

—

After Chris and Nursey say their goodbyes, Aunt Wil drives him to Queens. Aunt Vivian sits in the back, insisting Chris sit up front with Aunt Wil. He spends the first night eating dinner with Aunt Wil, Aunt Vivian, Lily, and Wil’s mom (whom Chris also just calls ‘Auntie’ because figuring out the family member title whether in English or Cantonese is already too difficult, let alone trying to figure it out in Mandarin).

To his surprise, while Auntie speaks mostly in Mandarin, she’ll stop and give him an English keyword, which helps with his comprehension immensely; Chris had been worried that she would expect him to be able to converse in Mandarin, though as he observes Aunt Vivian talking to Auntie speaking in Mandarin as haltingly as Chris does, he can see that Auntie does this for Aunt Vivian as well.

“今年吃月饼了吗？你怎么庆祝感恩节？新年呢？Holidays?” Auntie demands to know. _[“Did you have mooncake? What did you do for Thanksgiving? How about New Year?”]_

“我没时间买月饼，所以今年没吃。感恩节后就是期末考试了，所以我假期时一直在复习。” His ears burn as he remembers Lunar New Year, the pitiful sight of him eating a hot dog bun as he made his way back to the T. “新年时也在考试，所以也没庆祝。” _[“No mooncake, I had no time to get some. Thanksgiving, I had finals after, so I just studied during the break. I had no time for Lunar New Year, either. Exams, you know.”]_

“那就这样决定，” Auntie says decisively. “小薇，Vivian，Chris 每次放假时跟你过假。” _[“It’s settled then. Wil, Vivian, Chris is staying with you every time he has break.”]_

“Wait, what?” Chris asks.

“Sure,” Aunt Wil says. “We’d love to have you.”

“Wait, but you don’t—”

Aunt Wil shakes her head. “Ma’s already made up her mind, and anyway, we would _love_ to have you over whenever. If you want to store your stuff here for the summer, just let us know, and we’ll drive up to get your stuff. The four boxes they let you keep in their storage is not going to be enough. Plus,” Aunt Wil says, dropping into a whisper, “I think Ma’s a little worried you’re going to forget you’re Chinese if you’re always on campus, surrounded by white people.”

Chris thinks back on the past year. “That’s… not really going to be a problem.”

But Auntie is already on the phone. “吃了吗？我会先说话，然后为了让你了解，我女儿会翻译给你。你儿子不能自己一个人过节日。所以呢，从现在开始他就会和 小薇和 Vivian 过。” _[“Have you eaten? I’m going to talk first, and then my daughter will translate to make sure you understand. Your son cannot spend holidays by himself. So he is going to stay with Wil and Vivian from now on.”]_

“Wait, what?” Amy asks, bewildered.

Auntie thrusts the phone into Aunt Wil’s hands. “Hey, Ames.”

“Wil? Hi! Was that your mom? You picked up Chris already, right?”

“Yeah, sorry about that. Hey, you raised a giant—he’s so tall now! Towers over me by a whole head.”

“够了，” Auntie says, watching the phone in Aunt Wil’s hand like a hawk. “帮我翻译成英语啦。” _[“Enough. Help me tell her in English.”]_

“Is… is she always like this?” Chris whispers to Lily and Aunt Vivian.

“Yeah,” Aunt Vivian whispers. “You’re very lucky, you know. She’s just your auntie. She’s my _mother-in-law_.”

“Excuse you?” Lily says. “She’s my _mother_.”

“Mine, too,” Aunt Wil pipes up from behind them, and they all jump. “Ma asked for the phone back, and I think Amy panicked and gave the phone to _her_ mom, and now they’re arguing about whether Chris needs to pay me back for gas money.”

“What? Of course I do,” Chris says. He digs into his pocket.

“No, of course you don’t,” Aunt Wil says at the same time, yanking his hand away.

“I could always Venmo you.”

“I could always Venmo you back.” Aunt Wil smirks. “I know how to say no very firmly. Learned from the best.”

Chris raises an eyebrow. “And what makes you think I’m going to strongarm you into taking it? I’m no good at that—Mom and Dad were never able to master it from their parents, but they still prepared me for this. They taught me how to be _stealthy_ about it.”

Aunt Vivian looks confused. “How are you going to be stealthy about it if you just told us?”

“He hasn’t said what exactly he’s going to do, though,” Lily points out. “I’m never going to master the Chinese way of getting people to accept gifts. Teach me your ways, Chris.”

When Chris finally turns in that night, he has a text waiting for him from Mom:

> Ngo pa ling ngoi di yun wui tai nay gau deen wa, saw yi ngo gum seh. Nay yew tuhw tuhw day day bay fan hay yuhw qeen bay koi. Mo mm gae duk!  
>    
>  _[‘I was afraid other people would be looking at your phone, which is why I’m writing like this. You have to pay her back for the gas money secretly. Don’t forget!’]_

He texts back, concentrating hard—it’s been a while since he and Mom have texted Cantonese phonetically, which is something only he and Mom understand; Dad came from Hong Kong to the U.S. when he was fifteen and learned Chinese before that, so he never had a need to type out or learn how the people born here communicated via Cantonese when they didn’t know how to write Chinese, and Kay’s command of Cantonese has never been strong enough to type like this, since Chris always translated between Kay and their grandparents. He likes having this just with Mom; it’s like a secret code in a way, a secret code that only they and other kids who grew up hearing and understanding Cantonese but didn’t know how to read or write Chinese and still wanted a way to communicate with it know.

> Ngo ji la! Mahn awn!
> 
> _[‘I know! Good night!’]_

(He sneaks the money into Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian’s fridge—Auntie had cooked that night, and after spotting all the red plastic bags neatly tied into knots in the bag under the kitchen window, Chris had guessed that the bags were new and had held the groceries that Auntie had bought to be cooked. After a peek in the fridge, which was empty but for beer and a squash that had turned completely black, he had guessed that Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian didn’t check their fridge much—and he’s right. Aunt Wil doesn’t text back to concede defeat upon discovery of the gas money, which was neatly placed in a red envelope, until a month later.

> Your parents aren’t flying out to move you in next year, right?
> 
> Nah. Why?
> 
> Can me and Vivian come in their stead?

After a spring break full of Auntie making sure he’s eating his fill of Chinese food (real rice!) before he has to go back, the last six weeks of his first year at Samwell are slightly easier to get through, especially when Lily helps him set up WeChat and he gets added to all the family group chats. It’s not perfect—he still misses Mom and Dad and Kay and Mama and Yeye and Popo and Gonggong too much, and Popo always sends Chinese clickbait articles to both the family group chat and just to him, so he gets the same thing that he can’t read twice—but it’s _better_.

* * *

**CHAPTER 1 NOTES**

  * As I already mentioned, Chris’ freshman year is [this](this) and [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/153806271199/chowder-hc-early-days-at-samwell) in fic form, and I feel like so many of the things I’ve already written about him in the form of headcanons on my omgcp blog were all subconsciously leading to this fic??   

  * The bit about not knowing the Chinese restaurant’s name in Chinese is truly a real struggle when I’m talking to my parents because I’ll say that I went to one called [English name] but then I’ll need to find it online and hope yelp or google streetview has a clear picture of the front to find out its Chinese name to see if my parents have heard of it. I honestly don’t know how I would’ve managed to do this if the internet didn’t exist  

  * Yumcha – in Cantonese, the literal meaning is ‘to drink tea’ and it’s just basically going to a Chinese restaurant with family/friends and eating and chatting a whole lot. Dimsum is served here and in Cantonese, it means ‘to touch the heart’. Dimsum (in canto, it’s actually ‘deemsum’ not as it’s pronounced in English) are these plates of like snacks/appetizers and stuff  

  * That whole part about going to a Chinese restaurant where the tables are set with forks and knives is drawn from my own experience. Tbh, all of the things Chris experiences are drawn from my own experience. But anyway so I wrote this in because having tables set with forks and knives and no lazy Susans was very striking to me bc I grew up in NYC, which has a big population of residents of Chinese descent, as did Chris, so I imagine that such an experience would also stick out to him  

  * Pleco – a lifesaver for talking to my parents (aka a Chinese-English dictionary app)  

  * Popo – Cantonese for maternal grandma  
Gonggong – maternal grandpa  
Mama – paternal grandma (‘Mama’ is also one of the ways you can say ‘Mom,’ but the pitch/tone is different)  
Yeye – paternal grandpa  

  * The thing popo says about all outside soup has MSG is a thing my own popo has said to me. I was never allowed to drink outside soup when I was at home bc of the MSG  

  * The Chinese zodiac has a 12-year cycle and there are 12 different animals, one for each year. Chris was born in 1996, which makes him born in the [Year of the Rat](https://www.chinahighlights.com/travelguide/chinese-zodiac/rat.htm).   

  * Song for this chapter, which was linked earlier is #1 in this playlist (originally sang by Yang Chengang, but I grew up with this version, where only the chorus is in Mando and the rest is in Canto). English translation is [here](http://mychineselyrics.webs.com/laoshuaidamixiang.htm), and it also links to like a MapleStory MV, which I find hilarious  

  * Wei Laoshi = Wei is the surname of the professor, laoshi is Mandarin for teacher. This is how they’d address the professor
  * Not recognizing his own Chinese name in Mando bc he grew up hearing it said in Canto is also based on my own experience rip. There are some similarities between Cantonese and Mandarin, but not always. Info on what his Chinese name is and what it means is [here](here)   

  * For more angst about his name, check out this other [fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12285123) I wrote   

  * Soup is a big thing in my home and something Cantonese people are known for. To my family’s dismay, I am not a fan of soup. I always say it’s not blood in my body, it’s soup bc I’ve drunk so much of it. I grew up with soup being just liquid; it wasn’t until college that I saw like creamy soups and soup with a lot of things in it like chicken noodle soup and stuff like that, which is why I stuck that in there too  

  * Brian mistaking Chris for Korean was drawn from my experience in a store in China when I was visiting one summer and apologized to someone for speaking bad Mandarin, to which their response was “are you Korean?” and they looked super confused when I said “no I’m American” bc American = just white, right lol (and also ppl everywhere assume that if you’re Chinese, you’re fluent). Like, in my experience, non-Asian Americans find the concept of ‘Asian American’ bizarre and contradictory bc Asian = foreign/immigrant and American = white/citizen  

  * ABC = American-born Chinese  

  * After a whole semester of taking a class in Mandarin Chinese, I found my Cantonese got rustier when I went home for winter break and I spent a few days agonizing over my identity so I just had to put that in here  

  * [Yun-Yut](http://www.asiapacificproperties.com/useful-information/chinese-festivals/51/) = renri in mandarin, ‘everyone’s birthday’   

  * Mixing up the Canto and Mando words for things like ‘and’ and ‘but’—the more formal you get in speaking/writing, the more similar the sentence structures and vocabulary and grammar are. But if you were to be speaking casually or using more common verbs like ‘to eat,’ etc, the Canto is completely different.   
  
I still mix the Canto and Mando for easy/common words like ‘and’ and ‘but’ when I’m super tired, especially bc I know the word for ‘and’ in Canto when I’m telling a story and saying like ‘and then this happened. oh, and this happened, and then…’ but don’t know the equivalent for Mando (I only know the word for ‘and’ when I’m saying ‘[object] and [object]’)  

  * [Integrated Chinese](http://ic.cheng-tsui.com/) is apparently a very common textbook across many colleges? my Chinese American friends and I all eventually re-found our way back to learning Chinese, and we just borrowed the textbooks from each other lol  

  * The commute Chris takes to Boston’s Chinatown is drawn from my own commute there back in college heh  

  * I tried going to Boston’s Chinatown for Lunar New Year dinner one time but it was super crowded, and I ended up waiting 3 hours to get a table, so that part is also drawn from my experience  

  * The word rhyming with ‘drink’ is the slur ‘ch/nk’   

  * Wil and Vivian are from the movie _[Saving Face](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saving_Face_\(2004_film\))_. You can find the stuff I’ve written on them in my [Saving](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/tagged/saving-face) Face tag; for ex., Chris learns of them in spring of 2015, which is about 10 years after the movie, so Wil and Vivian are ten years older by time of this fic  

  * Why I had Chris [avoid calling Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian by name](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/155371194724/i-can-imagine-chowder-doing-everything-in-his)  

  * Why I have Chris [call Wil’s ma Auntie](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/155600191309/omg-your-saving-face-x-check-please-posts-are) (and also some more notes on family dynamics)  

  * Part of the reason I wanted Chris to have Wil and Vivian as his aunts was so that he would have an excuse to visit NYC (where I’m from) and [take the bus with Nursey](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/155725507334/concept-chowder-visiting-his-aunts-wil-and-vivian)   

  * More on [family dynamics](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/153399432479/chowder-hc-aunts)  

  * The way I hc Chris’ and Wil’s families to be related—Lynn Chen and Michelle Krusiec, the actresses for Vivian and Wil respectively, are Taiwanese American. Joan Chen, who plays Wil’s ma, was born in Shanghai. I struggled with either making all three of them be of Taiwanese descent or to have roots/ancestry/family from Shanghai/mainland China. So idk what to do for that bc I don’t want to conflate or erase their ethnicities/identities/experiences?? I’m not sure about the screenwriter Alice Wu either—some say her parents immigrated from Taiwan, some say her parents left China [for Taiwan] during the Communist Revolution.   
  
But then I remembered that for Wil’s father (already deceased by the beginning of _Saving Face_ ), I hc him to be from Hong Kong/Guangzhou. Wil’s last name is Pang, which could be the Cantonese way to spell ‘Peng’ [which is the Mandarin for it, but both use the same character when written in Chinese]. I think it’s unlikely that it’s meant to be the Cantonese ‘Pang’ and is more likely to just be a different surname that is ‘Pang’ in Mandarin, considering the screenwriter’s background, but hey, a gay Canto Chinese American girl can dream).   
  
Anyway, so Wil’s dad is/was Chris’ mom’s [Amy’s] cousin, so one of Amy’s parents and one of Wil’s dad’s parents are siblings. That would make one of Amy’s parents, maybe her mom, Wil’s father’s aunt. Thus, Chris would be Wil’s dad’s cousin’s son. Or, alternatively/more simply, Wil is Amy’s cousin from her mom’s side / Wil’s aunt is Chris’ maternal grandmother. I think. I have no idea what that relationship would be called, in English or Chinese  

  * Wil is 42 now, 29 at the time of _Saving Face_. I rewatched the movie with Chinese subtitles and comparing it to the English-only script [which had English translations for the Chinese subtitles] to confirm Wil’s Chinese name  

  * Wil’s ma asking ‘have you eaten’ as the first thing she says on the phone is a Thing idk why but this is the first thing my parents will say when they call me, even before saying hello  

  * Something my Chinese American friends and I joke about are how aggressive older Chinese relatives are at getting you to accept gifts and also how aggressive our parents are at making sure we refuse them (or if we’re bad at refusing, bc I really don’t know how to push past my instinct to be polite and acquiesce and refuse something outright, learn how to sneak it back into their things)  

  * Texting phonetically in Cantonese [headcanon](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/155792746619/chowder-hc-texting)   

  * The state of Wil and Vivian’s fridge is based on Wil’s fridge in the movie  

  * WeChat: social network popular in China  

  * My gma does the same thing re: clickbait articles on WeChat  

  * I always make Chris call his gf 'Cait' or 'Farmer' bc I never remember if she spells her name with a 'y' or 'i' lol



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed!


	2. 月亮代表我的心 (moon represents my heart)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A car door slams. It won’t hit Chris until months later that the storm of anger, anxiety, dread, fear, and helplessness that seems to always arise within him upon hearing a car door slam all stems from this very moment.
> 
> “You misunderstood me earlier,” Ms. Enwhitled says, her voice even. Each word comes out slowly—deliberate and overly enunciated. She walks up to them. “Sorry I don’t speak Chinese.”
> 
> —
> 
> 无论怎么样，结果都一样。 [No matter what, the result is the same.]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am so sorry for the really long wait. i, predictably, used a lot of my own experiences (incl the beginning w/ ms. enwhitled) as inspiration for writing chowder's experiences bc i thought it'd be interesting to see how he would react and process them. however, bc some of those experiences were absolutely terrible, i ended up having a lot of anxiety about confronting those experiences again adl;fj;sldkf;l but i really wanted to write them out bc i feel like they're important for showing why/how his identity grows/develops the way it does. 
> 
> i missed an opportunity to say inspirasian so i'm taking it now (am i going to be using the -ation/-asian pun forever? yes) 
> 
> i apparently created the doc for ch2 on 10/14/17 and have spent over 60,000 minutes agonizing over it since then, which is apparently over 42 days. and as you can see, this portion is very... long (for me at least). i said in ch1 that the word count for each chapter was going to be lopsided, but at the time, i was thinking that i wouldn't be able to muster up 5k words for each chapter. 
> 
> @ past me you are so wrong look at this it has 16.6k (scratch that it's a little over 17.5k) words (the rest are notes to give context/provide a little commentary, as notes for a 17.5k word fic would def exceed the notes section's character limits), which is like... what. it's the most i've ever written for a single part/chapter and still astounds me. anyway ctrl+F 'chapter 2 notes' to find them
> 
> you may have noticed that i've changed the total chapter count to 5! this is bc i didn't want to write a fic that has only 4 chapters (the tetraphobia is real) + i wanted to write about chris going to china and hong kong, which is going to happen in the next chapter (ie the interlude). each chapter is still going to be paired with a song, and the interlude is no different, except that the song is going to be an english one bc i thought it'd be cool for the interlude to take place in china and HK and have an english song, since every other chapter takes place at samwell and has a chinese song. i've added it to the playlist now (link below)
> 
> warnings for: racism, microaggressions, infantilizing language from bitty, stereotypes, internalized racism
> 
> get ready for: aunts wil and vivian, chris' friendship w/ lardo, chris' sister kay, chinese class, a major/minor declaration, mooncake, attempts to insert "the moon represents my heart" metaphors as much as possible, feelings about stereotypes, awkward discussions about feelings, a few conversations written in chinese that gave me a headache bc i don't trust google translate, and me crying about chowder
> 
> also, there is little to no hockey or anything from canon bc i completely forgot and then when i remembered i already had 16k words so maybe this could be seen as filling in the gaps of chowder's life when he's not at hockey?? 
> 
> this chapter's song: 月亮代表我的心 (moon represents my heart) (#2 on the [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtStoH71eEUs0kTinHoW7fyZBtprpFWre))

The second time around, things don’t feel as alien. There are giant T-shirts covering the car seats, just like in the Chow minivan, and Chinese music is playing, though it’s Mandarin, not Cantonese—but Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian are doing him a huge favor in bringing him back to Samwell for his second year, so he’ll take what he can get.

And anyway, it’s not like “The Moon Represents My Heart,” which has been playing on repeat because Aunt Vivian has been serenading her ever-amused wife for the past half-hour, is unsettlingly unfamiliar to him; it brings him back to karaoke with his high school friends, to one of the few Chinese songs they ever knew how to sing. ~~One of the songs he used to sing as a duet with Noah Long because it was Their Song, but that would be digressing.~~ Swap out Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian for Mom and Dad, who also do the thing where one of them mans the steering wheel with just one hand and holds the hand of their spouse with the other (if the kids are sleeping), some 90s Cantopop, and a few elbow jabs from Kay—and a Pang-Shing road trip is pretty much identical to a Chow one.

Or, maybe he doesn’t feel like he’s arrived in a different country this time because he already went through that last year, and armed with all that he’s learned from last year, he’s ready for anything and everything.

As soon as they can get moving, at least, because Samwell on move-in day is, as expected, _packed_. It seems like everyone was held up in the Stamford traffic jam and arrived at the same time, since cars are parked everywhere, even littered across the grass by the Pond; the stream of people continuously entering and exiting the front doors to the dorm down the block keeps Chris from even being able to see Nursey’s dorm itself. There are a few cars in front of theirs, hiding under the ornate arch decorating the front entrance to Nursey’s dorm. Looking out the window, Chris can see the sun beginning to set; despite the sun still being out, a hint of the moon peeks out from behind a cluster of trees and is basically the only area currently not occupied by cars. ( _The Final Frontier: Space_ , his mind immediately supplies, with obligatory echoes for ‘space’—he blames Ransom for that one.)

Chris is slightly luckier, since he’s living in the Haus this year. However, he still needs to drop off some stuff for Nursey from his moms first, since Nursey returned to campus a few weeks early for First-Year Guide training. Their minivan is third in line from the front door, but they’ve been sitting here for the past half-hour, which is why Aunt Wil put the car in park twenty minutes ago (though she still has her hand on the PRNDL, just in case).

 **Ginglymostoma cirratum  
** +1 347-689-1270

—Aug 16—

 **4:48 PM** we’re almost here, just waiting to unload, and that’ll prob be another 15 min lol  
**4:48 PM** tho that’ll be perfect since you said your fyg training ends at 5ish today  
**4:49 PM** as promised, three big care packages from your moms!  
**4:50 PM** your mama said there’s a loaf of homemade fig bread in there  
**4:50 PM** so make sure you eat that right away! fig for the fyg, she told me to say

awww ty c!! btw the red box is yours **4:52 PM**  
they are so lucky i like figs more than i hate their puns **4:52 PM**

 **4:54 PM** what?? dude! you/r moms didn’t have to do that!!!  
**4:55 PM** i said they didn’t need to give us anything!!!!!!

that’s why maman came up with a plan to deceive you **4:59 PM**

 **5:02 PM** ughhhhhhhh (thanks <3)

yw c :) **5:03 PM**  

“Looks like they’re going to be a while,” Aunt Wil says. The little entryway is narrow and dark; the arch is barely wide or long enough for even one car. Chris can’t see what’s going on from where they are outside the bottleneck, but he doesn’t need to, to know students and their parents are unloading their boxes at the front door, one car at a time. Judging from their position, he’s guessing there are still two cars in front of them. “Anyway, can you confirm your mailing address for me again? So I know where to send the mooncake this year.”

“Yeah, sure. It’s #151, then the address of the school. When is that again?”

“Late September,” Aunt Wil replies. “The 27th?”

“The 27th,” Aunt Vivian confirms. Chris can hear the click from her phone as she finally closes the tab for the lyrics to “The Moon Represents My Heart” and looks up the date for Mid-Autumn Festival this year. “I’m going to pop into the bathroom real quick. I think Derek said this dorm has one on the first floor?”

“Yep, to your right once you go inside. And thanks. Can’t wait,” Chris says honestly. He remembers the Pan-Asian Council and Chinese Students’ Association co-hosting a dinner for the holiday last year, but he’d been immature and pulled an Elsa to sulk in Chinatown by himself, so.

“You have to declare your major this year, right?” Aunt Wil asks. “Do you know what you want to do?”

“Yeah, next semester. To be honest, I’m not sure. I was thinking maybe compsci, but I don’t know. I don’t really feel anything for it, but… money. The only thing I’m certain about at this point is that I’m going to minor in Chinese. Only thing is, if I want to get to the higher levels faster, I need to get into the heritage-track classes, and the only way I can do that is if I take Level II Intensive Chinese for Wintersession, so that I can skip the class I would’ve been taking next semester. Because after all _that_ , I was thinking about doing a summer abroad in China.”

“I did a minor in Chinese, too,” Aunt Wil says. “It takes a little time to figure out how to fit a minor like that into the rest of your schedule, because learning a language is always extra work, but if you ever have any questions about juggling everything, you can always ask me. And if you need any Chinese help, especially since you’ll be cramming a whole semester of coursework in three weeks, Ma can definitely help with that.”

“It just feels really weird. I can’t believe just last year I started college, and now I have to decide on, like, the rest of my life.”

“Majors don’t bind you to a particular career for the rest of your life, and sometimes what you end up with as a career might not even have anything to do with your major,” Aunt Wil says. “I mean, I did pre-med and ended up being a doctor, but I know someone who majored in English and ended up becoming a marine biologist, so it’s not all set in stone.”

“I like compsci fine, but with that as my major and Chinese as my minor, I just feel like, I don’t know, a stereotype? Which is ridiculous, I know, because people themselves can’t be stereotypes but—I don’t know. Did you always want to be a doctor?”

“No. But it was what everyone was expecting,” Aunt Wil says. She budges the car up a few inches. “And I put a lot of pressure on myself to go through all the years of school and take on all that debt, because I wanted to, I don’t know, pay Ma back and give her a better life like she had done for me. But on the outside, people were always like, ‘Oh, an Asian going into pre-med? Like we haven’t seen that before. It’s really easy for Asians to be doctors because they’re all so smart.’ I think, if I hadn’t become a doctor… I don’t know what I would have done, really. I didn’t exactly have a ‘calling’—I was just lucky I ended up being good at this, even though it’s not what I’d call a passion for me.”

There’s a tap at the window—Aunt Vivian’s back from the bathroom.

“Hey, Viv. Tell us about your life,” Aunt Wil says, as Aunt Vivian gets back into the car. “Did you always want to be a dancer?”

“Pretty much? It wasn’t like I was going to get into college—school was always a struggle, and no one realized I was dyslexic until I was, like, nineteen. My teachers and parents would all tell me I just wasn’t applying myself enough. Nobody believed me when I said I was having a lot of trouble making sense of letters. I think that’s why I fell in love with dance. What are we talking about?”

“Chris is worrying about his major.”

“Not worrying, exactly, but compsci isn’t something I have particularly strong feelings about, and I just feel like if I’m majoring in that and minoring in Chinese, it feels like it’s something people would expect from me?”

“Fuck them,” Aunt Vivian says, turning to him. She ducks, laughing, when Aunt Wil reaches over to pinch her for her language. “Honestly, fuck them. If they think you’re a stereotype, that’s on them, not you, because they’re the ones looking at your life and deciding they have to put you into a box in order to make sense of it. Before, when I was still doing ballet, I used to get a lot of crap about being an Asian ballerina. They’d joke about me bringing dishonor to my family, or ask me if I was in the right place because this was a dance workshop, not a study group or something. Then I was a gay Asian dancer, and suddenly everyone had thoughts about that. Again. But you know what?”

“What?” Chris asks.

“They always will. They will _always_ have something to say about me, and I’m not going to be a hypocrite and say just ignore them, because that can be impossible, but _they’re_ the assholes for reducing human beings like that. I’m not the problem, and neither are you.”

“Yeah,” Chris says, after a moment. “You’re right.”

“Again, majors aren’t set in stone, and if you discover along the way that you don’t want to do compsci after all, fine. As long as you don’t keep yourself from majoring in compsci because you ‘don’t want to be a stereotype,’” Aunt Wil says. “You may never feel that strongly about compsci or anything else you come across in college—that day just might never come. But that doesn’t mean you wasted your time. It just means that you’re not interested in what college has for you. Though I _will_ say, though, that compsci is a great way to make ‘fuck you’ money.”

“Wait, f—? Uh.” He makes a face. “Cursing in front of you feels weird.”

“The concept’s from Lucy Liu,” Aunt Vivian explains. “Basically, she’s saying that you might hate what you’re doing at the moment, but do it anyway, so you can have the money for a rainy day. So that in the future, when another thing you hate comes along, you have the money to say no.”

“Hearing her say that changed my life,” Aunt Wil says, fiddling with her shirt. “I wish I’d known that when I was younger, when I was sleeping three hours a night preparing for the MCATs, and later, doing my residency—when I kept thinking about how I was wasting all my time doing all this for my mother and not myself… I wanted so badly to be the good, self-sacrificing daughter doing everything I could to repay my mother for her own sacrifices to give me a better life, but a part of me always knew I was too selfish, too angry at my mother for the career path I found myself on.”

Aunt Vivian places a hand over hers. “You’re not selfish,” she says softly.

Aunt Wil looks away, face red.

“I don’t think you’re selfish, either,” Chris says awkwardly, though he pushes through it. “I haven’t experienced anything even remotely similar to the stuff you’ve gone through, but I don’t think you’re a bad person for thinking those things, and I don’t think you wasted your time either, because like you were saying, becoming a doctor was a great way to earn your f—your ‘screw you’ money. Plus, it’s not like your job is everything, right? You still your own interests and hobbies outside work—”

“—like dancing with me—”

Aunt Wil snorts. “You mean falling over my feet all the time. But th—”

The car behind them honks for a solid thirty seconds. Chris nearly takes himself out when he hits his head on the ceiling.

“Saved by the horn,” Aunt Wil says, her blush still going strong. While most of him is shaking from the pain, he’s also relieved, because yeah, they really are quite terrible at talking about this kind of thing, and thank goodness for the out. “Sorry about your head, though. You okay?”

“Yeah.” Chris presses his head between his knees. “I just need a minute.”

The car behind them honks again.

Chris groans. “Maybe more than a minute.”

“What the hell, I’ve already moved up the literal _inch_ of free space we just got.” Aunt Wil scowls. “You’d think they’d be more understanding. They _do_ know _everyone_ is moving in today, right?”

“Bet you the driver behind us is white,” Aunt Vivian says.

“A white lady,” Aunt Wil adds.

“Late fifties, always says the customer is right, and is named Susan,” Chris says.

Aunt Vivian turns around and looks. “Ding, ding, ding! Right on all counts, except for your last two, Chris, because we can’t verify those yet. Though I imagine you’re not going to be that off.”

There’s silence for a moment, as the three of them watch a white middle-aged dad in front of them wrestle with whatever’s tied to the roof of their car.

“Come on,” Aunt Wil says finally. “They’re definitely going to be a while, so why don’t we start getting Derek’s stuff out? He doesn’t have that many boxes, and we’re only a few steps from the front door. Then I’ll drive off as soon as the car in front of us leaves. Wouldn’t want to keep Ms. Entitled White Lady waiting.”

“Oh my god. Ms. _Enwhitled_ ,” Chris says, already laughing halfway through. “And sure.”

“Oh my _god_ ,” Aunt Wil says, while Aunt Vivian snorts. “I’m using that for _ever_.”

They get out of the car, still laughing. Aunt Vivian opens the trunk and ties up her hair.

“Don’t worry, I got it,” Chris says, grabbing a box. “Also, the red one’s mine apparently. Nursey says it’s to thank us for helping us with everything, and he knew we would say no, which is why the subterfuge.”

“You saying dancers can’t lift?” Aunt Vivian jokes, showing off her biceps. “Look at these muscles right here.”

“Yeah, don’t be sexist, Chris,” Aunt Wil jokes, bumping his shoulder with hers, as she hands off another box to her wife. “And it just means we need to up our game—there’s a potluck for the hospital coming up soon, so I’ll just make loads of dumplings for Noelle. So many that she’ll just _have_ to take them home to make sure they don’t go to waste.”

“I didn’t mean it like that! Just promise you won’t tell your mom you guys helped because then she’d tell my grandparents, and then my grandparents would automatically assume I _made_ you do everything for me,” Chris says. “Like, obviously, that’s not the case, but you know that’s what would ha—”

Ms. Enwhitled gets out of her car. “Excuse me. Mind moving your car up, so the line can keep moving? We’ve been waiting here for a while.”

Chris straightens up. “There’s still a car in front of us. So we’re still waiting, too.”

Ms. Enwhitled says nothing, just gets back in her car. Chris, Aunt Wil, and Aunt Vivian share a look. He can’t help but scoff—really?

“She think we just decided to randomly unload in the middle of the road, or what?” Aunt Vivian says.

“Or what,” Chris mutters, handing off a second box to Aunt Vivian.

“I think the last box is that one over there,” Aunt Wil says, pointing to Chris’ left.

When Chris turns to look, he realizes the car in front of them has just started to drive away, and he’s about to tell Aunt Wil that when—

A car door slams. It won’t hit Chris until months later that the storm of anger, anxiety, dread, fear, and helplessness that seems to always arise within him upon hearing a car door slam all stems from this very moment.

“You misunderstood me earlier,” Ms. Enwhitled says, her voice even. Each word comes out slowly—deliberate and overly enunciated. She walks up to them. “Sorry I don’t speak Chinese.”

She gives him a look, and he feels like every part of him in her line of sight has been sliced away by the steel in her gaze—his eyelashes, the peeling skin on his lip, the tip of his nose. Chris goes taut so fast that his bones shake from the force of it. He has the weirdest image in his head of his bones all getting shoved out of his body at breakneck speed until his whole skeleton is standing ten feet in front of him, before all 206 bones zoom back into him, jolting his entire body as they do. His ears ring.

_Sorry I don’t speak Chinese. Sorry I don’t speak Chinese. Sorry I don’t speak Chinese. Sorry I don’t speak Chinese._

Only when the ringing subsides enough for him to kind of hear again does he realize that what he’s hearing is the echo of whatever he shouted reverberating off the fucking arch, which was the very reason for why this whole thing even _was_ a thing in the first place.

But… the world goes on. Dully, underneath the slightly-less-than-deafening-but-not-that-much-better roaring in his ears, he can hear Aunt Vivian start to retort. From what he can see, which isn’t much, because he just can’t focus, Aunt Wil is holding Aunt Vivian back from getting up into Ms. Enwhitled’s face.

Aunt Wil uses her polite White Person Voice to say she’ll move the car up, which is then punctuated by a pregnant-turned-awkward pause, when Ms. Enwhitled finally realizes that Aunt Wil has stopped talking—i.e., she’s not going to apologize.

The world goes on. Aunt Wil gently pulls him away from the car trunk and closes it. But he keeps hearing Aunt Wil’s White Person Voice in his head, playing on loop—and it _rankles,_ makes him want to scratch at his own skin until he gets it all out of him, because he _hates_ hearing her use the voice she’s perfected over the years that makes him think of his own White Person Voice and the front he puts on and—

The world goes on. It has to, so it does. All the input from his senses suddenly slam into his brain, and his knees buckle from having heard, seen, and smelled nothing, to experiencing _everything_ in less than a second. The heat? Sweltering. His skin is going to melt right off, though he feels it more abstractly than anything else. The tires of the minivan rolling across the road, as Aunt Wil drives off? A wall of never-ending crackling sounds that keep closing in on him, threatening to absorb him into the integrity of the wall itself. The air? Pungent with the odor of overripe vegetation. It makes his stomach turn. And while he doesn’t need glasses, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t usually see the hyperrealistic veins on leaves unless he’s looking at them up close, like eyeball-nearly-touching-it close.

He really, really wants to throw up.

Suddenly, his arms no longer feel like they’re suffering, and he realizes Aunt Vivian’s taken Nursey’s last box from his hands and stacked it on top of the others. She puts a hand on his forehead and wraps an arm tightly around his side that warms him right up; only then does he realize he’s been shivering and his hands are clammy, despite the 85-degree weather.

Realistically, Chris knows barely five minutes have even elapsed during the whole exchange. Three, even. But he feels like it’s been at least an hour. Longer. Like he’s visibly aged since then.

As Ms. Enwhitled drives up to the front—as smugly as can be gleaned from the sidewalk while avoiding looking inside the car—Chris presses still slightly clammy fingers to his lips. His muscle memory kicks in, reenacting the way his lips had moved not five minutes earlier. What had he shouted at her? Three syllables. Long ‘e’ vowel at the end. Lips wide enough to bare his teeth at some point.

Excuse me. _Excuse me._

Despite what Aunt Vivian had pointed out about stereotypes—not an hour ago!—he immediately feels humiliated. Disappointed at himself. _Angry_ at himself. Sure, he’d said it angrily, but _Excuse me_ is just about the politest—and worst—thing he could have ever said in response to something like that, especially as an Asian.

There were a million other things he could’ve said: _That’s racist. Isn’t this the kind of thing that you teach your kids isn’t okay to say? How can you tell we’re Chinese? Do you think every single Asian you come across is Chinese? How dare you speak to me this way. Did you know that Chinese refers to the written language and also_ hundreds _of languages/dialects, so it doesn’t even make sense for you to ‘apologize’ for ‘speaking’ Chinese? How exactly was that even an apology? Do you even know what Mandarin and Cantonese_ are _? If I couldn’t understand English, why would I even be here in the first place? You obviously think we’re not from here because you’re assuming we speak Chinese and not English, like I’m an international student or something, but if we weren’t from here, then why would we have driven our own car to Samwell? Wouldn’t I have arrived in a taxi or something? Why do you automatically think Asians don’t know English?_

Or more succinctly: _Fuck you._

But what did he say? _Excuse me._ Like a passive, quiet, goody two-shoes Asian.

And as soon as he thinks that thought, he hates himself, because—he’s not supposed to be that kind of guy anymore. Not since high school. Not since he started learning about this kind of stuff.

But he also feels— _foolish_. Naïve. He’d faced racism from his classmates last year, never from the parents, but—how could he have not foreseen it? The racism from his classmates had to come from _somewhere_. He almost starts laughing at how absurdly sheltered he’s been that this is the first time he’s truly felt unsafe on campus, even after all the shit hurled at him last year. This was all it took to rattle him? He’s not ready _at all._

How did he ever think he could come back to Samwell a second time?

Aunt Vivian gives him a squeeze. “Hey, you okay?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know.”

She sighs and rests her head on his shoulder, using the hand of the arm she’s got wrapped around his side to give him a few comforting rubs, which help with his still stuttered breathing. “Yeah, I know. How long until Derek gets here?”

Chris reaches into his pocket for his phone. The blood in his veins still feels like it’s chugging along like molasses, despite his heart still going miles and miles a minute. How long is this going to last? He’d panic over how _wrong_ and _disconnected_ from his surroundings he still feels, but he’s just too drained. “He’s running a little late and is coming over now, so maybe—”

“Oh my god, Chowder! Hey! How was your summer?”

Aunt Vivian untangles herself from Chris, who then finds himself with an armful of—

Dex.

Dex, who came from the passenger’s side of the car that had just driven up to the dorm. Dex, who came from Ms. Enwhitled’s car. Dex, who is Ms. Enwhitled’s _son_.

Dex, who watched the whole thing unfold in front of him, less than two feet away, like he was in a movie theater—and did nothing. Did nothing while his mom took a dig at Chris and his aunts, and a blatantly racist one at that. While his mom took out her misplaced frustration on them and evidently believes she’s been right all along, because she never saw the car in front of them drive off while they were getting Nursey’s stuff out of the car, which they were only doing so that they’d be out of the way faster.

While Chris completely shut down and relived every single microaggression he’d ever experienced—all at once—and is only now coming back to himself.

Dex releases him from his hug. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in the Haus?”

“Yeah. I’m just dropping some stuff off for Nursey first. My aunts from NYC drove me this time around, and turns out, Aunt Wil—she’s looking for parking elsewhere—actually works at the same hospital as one of Nursey’s moms, so we helped them bring Nursey some stuff.” Chris gestures at the three boxes.

Dex lets out a low whistle. “Wow, that’s a lot. He never needs for anything, huh.”

Last year, when he or Nursey called Dex out on it, Dex would go quiet, nod, leave, come back later, and do it all over again, until Nursey said he’d gotten tired of it and wasn’t going to waste energy on dealing with him anymore. But Nursey’s not here right now, so—“What are you saying,” Chris asks, voice low and dangerous.

“Will! You know him?”

“Yeah, Ma! This is Chowder. Our goalie, remember? The best freshman goalie in the NCAA last year?”

Chris feels her eyes on him again. He gives her a thin smile.

“Give me a second, Ma. I have to pick up my room key,” Dex says, dashing into the dorm.

“We… got off on the wrong foot,” Ms. Enwhitled says, holding out a hand to Aunt Vivian. “I’m Sue Poindexter.”

Sue. Chris’ mouth quirks. Half-right, then. He’ll take what he can get.

Aunt Vivian keeps her arms crossed over her chest. “ _Sorry_. I don’t speak English, remember? I only speak Chinese, so I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

Mrs. Poindexter’s jaw falls open, and Chris would relish it longer, but that’s when Nursey comes racing up the street and barrels straight into Chris’ arms.

“C! You made it! Thank you so much for doing this, dude. And thank you so much, Mrs. Pang-Shing. It’s so great to see you again.”

“How many times have I told you to just call me Vivian? You make me sound so old.”

“Too many. I never learn.” Nursey winks as he hugs her, too. “Where’s Dr. Pang-Shing?”

“Oh crap, she’s probably still driving around,” Chris curses. “She was… Never mind, it’s a long story. I’ll help you bring these up, and then I have to run.”

“Sure, definitely. Thank you so much again. I’m sorry for my moms.”

“Don’t apologize for your moms, you dick!” Chris playfully punches his shoulder. “It was no problem at all. Seriously.”

Nursey hoists up a box and groans. “I’m a little afraid to find out what’s in here.”

“Ha. Me, too,” says a voice from behind them.

“Dex,” Nursey says, using his White Person Voice.

“Nurse.”

Chris rolls his eyes. “If Nursey’s using your nickname, you should be using his, too. Otherwise, it’s just weird.”

“Fine. So, Nursey, what’s in there? You forget to bring your bedding again?”

Logically, Chris knows it’s a joke. He knows Dex is referencing last year, when Nursey had forgotten to pack his winter blanket, so he had to pay quite a bit to ship it over. But. What he’s saying seems to be laced with a dash of latent snideness. It’s an innocent remark, superficially, at least, but that just makes it the perfect cover for denying any racist or otherwise prejudiced connotations.

Has he always talked like this?

Hasn’t he, though?

“That was _one time_ ,” Nursey says. He’s still using his White Person Voice. “Anyway, talk to you later, Dex. C needs to run.”

Chris, Aunt Vivian, and Nursey drop off the boxes in Nursey’s room. “I’ll walk you out,” Nursey says. “C, you okay? You said it was a long story, and you’re looking a little pale.”

“I’ll tell you later,” Chris promises. They reach the door, where Dex and his mom are unloading his things. “Hey, Nursey, before we go, I have a pun for you. You’ve heard of white entitlement; now get ready for— _enwhitlement_.”

“I fucking love that, holy crap,” Nursey says. “You hear that, Dex? That’s what you are!”

“Excuse me—” Mrs. Poindexter begins.

“Sorry. Again, we don’t understand you,” Aunt Vivian says slowly and loudly, “because we still only speak Chinese. Goodbye.”

As they leave for the Haus, Chris catches sight of the full moon in the sky again, despite the sunset in the backdrop. Later, he’ll see it again when Aunt Vivian gleefully informs her wife of the five-hour playlist she’s compiled for the drive back, solely consisting of various “The Moon Represents My Heart” covers.

Chris will jokingly start humming the opening bars, leading Aunt Wil to jokingly run to the car, before doubling back to give him another hug. He’ll confirm with her again his shipping address, hug Aunt Vivian tight, and watch them go from the front porch of the Haus. Long after he can’t see their car anymore, Chris will look up at the moon again, finding comfort in knowing it’s the same moon following Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian on their drive back to NYC. The same heart. He will mull over how peeking from underneath his eyelids to watch Aunt Vivian unabashedly serenade Aunt Wil earlier that afternoon seems like it happened months ago, not mere hours ago.

The moon will look foggy tonight, and he’ll wonder what it means.

—

Intimacy: stolen moments, only to be had in private. He’d learned that early on with the way his family rarely doled physical affection, his grandparents and father preferring to show their love through doing things, his mother being only slightly better at reaching out to hug him during Significant Moments, Kay annoyingly following him around all summer instead of saying she missed him while he was away at college.

He’d also learned that from his other Asian American friends, the lot of them awkwardly making plans to meet after school, under the excuse of needing to do something, when they’d all transparently just wanted to have and enjoy each other’s company. Buying school supplies. Doing the grocery shopping. Even walking to a farther bus stop because someone needed to go to the dentist after school that day.

He’d even learned it from his relationships and that the reticence to show affection in front of other people was always there, regardless of whom he was dating. Whether he’d been with Pria Desai, Michelle Nguyen, Noah Long…

Not that he hasn’t been guilty of it himself—he’s shied away from saying ‘I love you’ to his parents, given Kay haphazardly wrapped books she’s mentioned in passing that she’s wanted to read without making eye contact, and opted for a wave instead of a hug when whoever he’s dating has just arrived for a group hangout more times than he can count.

This summer was different. Not _that_ different, but still noticeable. He’d noticed it at Samwell, but it wasn’t until the summer that he became fully aware of all the little things that made dating Cait a bit different from his high school relationships. Little things like Cait wrapping his arm around her waist as they walked along the beach to watch the sunset, or dropping a quick kiss on his lips in front of his friends after she finally found the table they were meeting at for brunch, or grabbing his hand immediately whenever they were walking together until he started doing it, too—he’d never thought of himself as a touchy-feely person, but now he’s not so sure.

Somehow, Samwell is different, too. _Again_. Gone are the idyllic days of summer, when he and Cait would just go off and do their own thing, and no one batted an eye. Probably because there _were_ no prying eyes.

Now, though, as he tumbles into a booth for six at Annie’s to meet Cait’s best friends—who were all studying abroad last semester—all eyes are on him. He doesn’t fail to notice that he’s the only one who isn’t white here.

Cait is on his right. One of her friends, a white girl squishing him on his left, claps. “So. Chris. News on the street is, you’ve been shacking up with our Caity-girl since last year.”

Cait rolls her eyes. “You knew that, Quinn.”

“Well, of course, but we still need to vet him,” another white girl says, from Cait’s other side. “I’m Tina.”

Chris offers her a smile. “Hi.”

“Man, is that all this guy can say?” a white guy at the other end of the table says. Chris is pretty sure he’s seen him hanging out at the LAX frat house.

“Or, he just hasn’t had a chance to speak because you assholes won’t shut up,” Cait says. “Anyway, the douche who just spoke is Thad, and the one he’s got his arm around is his girlfriend, Steph. I was the only first-year added to the volleyball team last year, so these dorks took me in before committing the ultimate betrayal, when they all _fucked off to Oxford_ for the spring.”

“So that’s why I never got to meet any of you,” Chris says. “Heard plenty about you guys over the summer, though, when we were hanging out.”

“You were able to hang out during the summer? Where are you from?” Steph asks.

“California,” Chris says, with bated breath, but thank god ‘But where are you _really_ from?’ doesn’t follow.

He relaxes a little bit when Tina asks how he and Cait met, which of course then turns into an “Oh my god, you’re on the hockey team?” and he doesn’t even mind all that much that it sounds more like “Oh my god, _you’re_ on the hockey team?” because it’s the perfect segue into talking about the kind of shit Ransom and Holster get into. Ransom truly does know everyone on campus.

“Alright, enough pleasantries,” Quinn says. “What we’re really here to do is give you the shovel talk.”

“Come _on_ ,” Cait says, rolling her eyes, though she doesn’t say anything after that.

Quinn gestures at her plate. “Okay, see this hash brown? That’s you—actually, no, _that_ one’s you, because the other one is too dark.”

Chris can feel his face turning into a grimace. Yikes.

“If you treat Cait well, like the princess she is, you’ll be fine. But!” Quinn then uses her fork to mash it to pieces. “If you break her heart, we won’t hesitate. Clear?”

It takes literally everything in Chris to not react—he’s never handled sudden movement outside of hockey well—and it’s not lost on him that again, everyone else at the table is white and is apparently co-signing her threat, which he logically _knows_ isn’t a serious one, but it’s kind of hard to keep reminding himself of that, when everyone else at the table is quiet and tense and just _staring_ at him.

“ _Relax,_ Quinn,” Cait says, after a second too long, placing a hand over his. Chris smiles distantly. “Chris _definitely_ treats me well.”

Her remark earns a bunch of whoops from the table, and Quinn drops the talk, shoveling the rest of her hash browns into her mouth, while Chris subtly pushes his plate away.

Chris spends the rest of brunch laughing along as Cait’s friends catch her up on their study abroad experience. Cait’s different around her friends, more abrasive and blunt, and it makes sense that she’s different around them—after all, when they’re alone together, Cait lets him see her softer side. When she’s at the Haus, she’s basically family.

It’s just different, that’s all. But it does hurt a little that he doesn’t really know the volleyball team the way Cait knows SMH.

“Alright, alright, before we go, we should take a selfie,” Steph says. “Let’s do a normal one and then silly faces, okay?”

Cait does a peace sign, which gets called out by everyone else right away. Chris is about to cross his eyes when he spots her other friends all lifting the corners of their eyes and sticking their tongues out.

He presses his lips to Cait’s cheek instead to hide half his wince from view, right before Steph snaps the photo, earning them overexaggerated cooing (Tina, Steph) and jeering (Thad, Quinn).

If he hadn’t been there, would Cait have done it, too?

—

Two days before Mid-Autumn Festival, Chris spots the mail carrier coming down the street, toward the Haus. He’s already halfway down the stairs when Bitty calls up them to announce another of his baked creations is done.

“Where are you going? That’s not the way to the kitchen,” Bitty hollers after him, as Chris skids to a stop in front of the door.

A signature, package, and tactfully blank stare later, the latter of which leaves the mail carrier falling over himself to both explain and apologize for the butchered “Xie xie” he said as Chris signed for it—later, Chris looks up. “Sorry, Bitty, I just didn’t want to miss my aunts’ care package.”

Lardo is next to come down the stairs. “I heard you running. Did you finally get it?”

“Yes! We’re still going to share, right?” Chris asks. He runs his thumb over the address label, over Aunt Wil’s messy scrawl.

“Of course, dude. My favorite part about this holiday is eating all my friends’ different mooncakes. I’m about to start drooling over here, which sucks, because I gotta get ready for class now. It’s a _seminar_.”

“I’ve never seen you this excited for any of the things _I_ bake, Miss Larissa Duan,” Bitty says. “Maybe I should give making these a try?”

Lardo turns, right when her phone alarm goes off. She makes direct eye contact with him and pats his shoulder, which is hilarious, considering their height difference. “Oh, Bitty. Of course not.”

The look on Bitty’s face is priceless. “Harsh,” he says finally.

“Gotta keep you humble because you keep insisting you can make my food better than someone actually from my culture,” she calls out, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. “Don’t you even _think_ you can make them better yourself, Bitty. Bye!”

“Get the notes from Nursey!” Chris shouts after her. “See you later!”

Fingers itching to open up the box, he starts to make his way up the stairs, when he hears Bitty clear his throat.

“Sweet goalie child, aren’t you forgetting something?”

Chris rolls his eyes at the term of address, but lets it slide; whatever will let him get to his mooncake faster ~~and allow him to not run the risk of making things awkward with Bitty because he’s pretty sure Bitty would just tell him he didn’t mean anything by it and also imply that Chris is being too sensitive~~. “Right, sorry. You said you made pie, right?”

“Right! I managed to wrangle a recipe for chiffon pie from my MooMaw just last weekend when she called me, and I’ll have you know I’ve had my eye on that one since I was twelve years old! There was this—”

“Wait, before I try your pie, do you want to try some of my mooncake? It’s a pastry we eat for Mid-Autumn Festival, which is this Sunday. There’s a whole thing about sharing it with friends and family.”

“Fine. And then you’ll finally taste my pie? I really want to know if my first try went well.”

“Promise.”

Chris uses his keys to slice open the box. Inside is a glossy metal tin, a full moon against the blue night sky painted on the front. He has fond memories of arguing with Kay about getting to keep the tin every year. When he lifts the tin out, there’s an envelope underneath. Bitty is tapping his foot impatiently, though, so Chris hurriedly grabs a knife, jimmies the cover open, and rips open the wrapper of a mooncake. He starts cutting it into fourths immediately, even though he always likes to pause and admire the intricate design first.

Bitty holds a piece between his index finger and thumb, sniffing it suspiciously. Chris catches Bitty wincing when he sees the yolk in the center. “What’s in this?”

“Lotus seed paste and dried egg yolk,” Chris says, trying to tamp down the rest of his brain already thinking that this was a mistake. “The brown mushy part is the lotus seed paste. It’s sweet. The orange is the yolk, and it’s a little salty.”

Chris pops his own piece in his mouth two seconds before Bitty does. He regrets it immediately.

Bitty makes an involuntary retching sound as he chews, swallowing quickly. “I don’t really like the egg part.” He grabs a cup, fills it with water, and gulps it all down. “Thank you for sharing it with me, but I don’t think it’s for me.”

“More for me, then,” Chris says weakly.

“Well, then. Now that I’ve eaten your moon pie, are you finally going to try my MooMaw’s award-winning chiffon pie recipe?”

Moon pie. Chris knows he’s going to be hearing that in his head for a while. At least it’ll add some variety to _Sorry I don’t speak Chinese_ and _If you break her heart, we won’t hesitate_.

“Mooncake, not moon pie,” Chris says quietly, barely above a whisper. He takes a bite of the pie. It’s nauseatingly sweet, and he wants to throw up. “It’s great. Thanks, Bitty. I have to go put my mooncake in my mini fridge, though, before it goes bad. Since there’s no space down here.”

“Fine, fine, thanks for indulging me, honey! You really are the best goalie child I could ever ask for.”

Chris trudges out of the kitchen, the box heavy as stone in his hands.

“Chowder, honey?”

“Yeah?”

“Have a good Chinese holiday, you hear?”

“Thank you,” Chris says, horrified to find his eyes already welling up with tears, because what is he, in kindergarten? His throat clogs up soon after. Breaking into a sprint, Chris relies on muscle memory to return to his room. As soon as he gets there, he slams the door and drops the box on his bed, before trying to get his bearings.

He still has three whole mooncakes and half of one left. He already cut the one he and Bitty shared from into pieces, so he can give those to Lardo and Nursey. The rest—

The sound of a plastic wrapper hitting the wall startles him, which is when he realizes he’s thrown one of the mooncakes at the wall. He throws the second, then the third. Picks them back up and throws them at the floor. Presses on them with his hands until the wrappers pop open and the mooncakes are squished and the plastic cartons are bent and the designs on the mooncakes are marred. Hammers at them with his fists, for a change of pace.

The sound of the last one popping open underneath the fleshy part of his hand brings him back to himself. He presses a hand to his face, and it’s wet. His breath comes out fast and choppy.

The mooncakes are utterly destroyed, smashed beyond recognition. Mooncake isn’t cheap, plus shipping—Aunt Wil and Aunt Vivian bought this for him, and he just…

He swipes at some of the mash with his fingers, jamming it in his mouth. He breaks down completely as the sweetness hits his tongue, openly crying now, and nearly chokes on it. He flinches as a wave of shame courses through him. How could he just—

Leaving the mess on the floor and wiping his fingers on his hoodie, he tears open the envelope and skims the letter. Aunt Wil tells him about his dad teaching her to eat mooncake with ice cream when Mom introduced her to him. Aunt Vivian tells him about how Aunt Wil wooed her like that on one of their early dates. Aunt Wil’s Ma writes a message in Chinese telling him to work hard. To top it off, Lily doodles vines and flowers all over the margins. She also writes out his name in bubble letters, and he smiles at the Superman ‘S’.

But his smile dims when he looks back at the floor.

He feels really guilty about what he did, but he knows he would just feel even more guilty if he threw them out, so he just tosses all of it back in the tin, sticks it in his mini fridge, and wipes away the smears left on the floorboards.

He lies on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

—

A few hours later, he blinks blearily. His face is still sticky from the tears, and it’s dark out. Only the full moon is visible, and its outline is muddled. Mom once told him a foggy moon means it’ll rain the next day.

Lardo comes back to the Haus with Nursey in tow, like always. Sometimes, if the food is good, he’ll meet them outside the building of their Trends in Modern Art seminar to get dinner together. Even though he’s not sure when he did, he’s relieved he fell asleep—the chef from Hong Kong was working today, and char siu was on the menu; at least he doesn’t have to invent an excuse for missing out on that.

Chris splashes water on his face and heads downstairs, giving them the slices he’d cut before… the incident.

“I love mooncake,” Nursey says.

“Where’s the rest?” Lardo bumps into his shoulder lightly. “It’s not a fair trade otherwise, Chow,” she jokes.

He gives them a smile, a sheepish one, with practiced ease. “It was so good I ate it all. Sorry.”

Neither of them believes him, but Lardo thankfully just takes out the ones she got from her family. Nursey presses three coffee cups of char siu, bok choy, and jasmine rice smuggled from the dining hall into Chris’ hands. Ransom and Holster materialize as they often do upon sensing food, Bitty comes over with more pie, and soon everyone’s distracted. Nobody notices that Chris doesn’t touch any of it.

—

 **CHN 201 Study Group**  
1:13 PM

 **Tom Henderson**  
did wei say if lesson 4 was gonna be on the test bc i'm still not sure abt how to use 无论…, 都…

 **Marie Walker**  
Oh shit, it better not be. I thought she only said L1-3

 **Tom Henderson**  
i thought 1-3 too, but we also finished 4 last week which is why i'm not sure  
in case it is, can you explain it **@Chris Chow**

 **Gillian Thomas**  
didn’t she say she was thinking about adding L4 bc we were moving faster than she was expecting? or at least that’s what she told me during office hours when i was asking her to be my major advisor

 **Marie Walker**  
But that’s not fair she didn’t tell everyone

 **Kevin Lopez**  
The test is in 30 min and you’re only saying this now? what the hell guys I didn’t look at L4 at ALL

 **Tom Henderson**  
**@Chris Chow** only you can save us now. how do you use 无论…, 都…

 **Marie Walker**  
**@Chris Chow** Teach us

**Kevin Lopez  
@Chris Chow**

**Chris Chow**  
sorry guys was eating. and uh i don’t remember sorry  
i also don’t remember her saying anything about L4 if that helps

 **Gillian Thomas**  
you use 无论…, 都… to say no matter something so you can use question words like 怎么after 无论. so it would be like 无论 是 [X] 还是 [Y]，[Verb] 不 [Verb]. after 无论, you can also use [interrogative pronouns] [rest of clause], [subject] 都 [rest of clause]  
for example, 无论怎么样，结果都一样。 [No matter what, the result is the same.]  
why do you guys always ask him when he never knows lol

—

The team goes out to Chinatown for Chris’ birthday. Chris would take more issue with Bitty immediately assuming Chris would want to eat Chinese food if he didn’t miss it so much (despite being indifferent to it before college because he ate it every day). And if he’d actually had the courage to call Bitty out on it, instead of letting the part of him that keeps saying he’s making a big deal out of nothing win over the rest of him. Again.

Instead, when Nursey wows them all with his balancing skills on the T ride there and everyone looks at him in surprise and he scoffs and says, “ _Hello_ , I’m from _New York_ ,” Chris pushes all of it down and just laughs and laughs.

He pushes it down again when Bitty asks Chris if the fish and lobsters and crabs in the tanks at the restaurant are pets.

And again when Dex makes faces upon seeing frog on the menu.

And yet again afterward, when Holster comments that this part of Boston looks sketchy at night and Jack agrees (though both of them earn elbow jabs from Lardo, and Shitty starts ranting about why they shouldn’t say things like that).

He pushes all of it down, until it’s all been compressed into a concrete layer between his stomach and his hips. However, there’s so much of it that the layer is still pretty thick, reaching up to his belly button, so he’s not hungry—hasn’t been, these past few weeks.

But the mooncake mash in his fridge won’t be edible forever, and Lardo helped him buy red bean ice cream when she’d gone home last weekend, so after a few hours of struggling to sound out a passage from his Chinese textbook (why are tones so _difficult_ ), he takes both out of the fridge and tiptoes down the stairs; midterms start that upcoming Monday, so quiet hours in the Haus are in effect.

Chris flips on the light switch. Both he and the person already in the kitchen jump a mile in the air.

“Um. Have you been eating mooncake in the dark?” Chris asks. He looks again. “Have you been eating _mooncake with Nutella_ in the dark?”

“I know, I know, it’s sacrilege to defile mooncake this way,” Lardo says, dipping her slice of mooncake into a bowl of Nutella. “Please don’t tell my grandma. It’s a metaphor.”

“Pot, I’m Kettle.” He gestures at the stacked containers in his hands. “Wait, is that _snow skin_ mooncake? I take it back; it _is_ sacrilege. And you kept all of it for yourself, too!”

“My roommate from freshman year shared it with me. I would _never_ let any of the hooligans in this Haus get any of this. Plus you’re one to talk, Kettle.” She nods at his mooncake tin. “I _knew_ there was no way you could’ve eaten all that so quickly. Even if you can be as disgusting as Holster at times, with all those eggs.”

He grabs a spoon, sits down, and pries open the lid of his ice cream. At the look on Lardo’s face, he gets up again and grabs a bowl, placing the ice cream from the spoon he was about to put in his mouth in there instead. “There was no way I could share these, either,” he says quietly, when he opens the tin up.

He already feels himself shaking, and all he can do is stare at the floor. Because he feels—like a child. He feels helpless and trapped in a body he can’t control and unable to speak when it matters the most. He turned nineteen years old today, and he still can’t keep himself from throwing temper tantrums and destroying things.

Lardo spoons out more Nutella. Chris pours out one of the mashed mooncakes into the bowl and adds more ice cream. Chris’ spoon clinks against the porcelain as he carves out a bit of the mixture.

“Freshman year, Family Weekend. I’d barely been at Samwell for three weeks and was already missing home, especially the food. My parents came to visit me and brought me durian, because it’s my favorite. I was meeting the team for lunch and brought some with me. When Shitty arrived at the table, he immediately said, ‘What’s that smell? It’s _rank_ ,’ which. Hypocrite, much?”

“What did you do?” Chris asks quietly.

“I ran out of the dining hall and dumped the whole thing in the trash.” She smiles ruefully. “My mom didn’t believe me when I said the white guys broke the Tupperware while playing with it. She also never forgave me, even after I replaced it. And then, of course, the only thing I could think about for the next few days was eating that durian.”

Lardo gestures at him to take some of her snow skin mooncake. He does, eating it plain first, then with the Nutella. It’s not bad, which he admits to her grudgingly. She grins.

“If you’re trying to tell me I shouldn’t let other people make me feel bad and keep me from eating my mooncake—”

She uses her spoon to peel away the skin of the mooncake and eats it. He smiles a little at that, because Kay systematically deconstructs hers like that, too. “Nah. I’m saying I am still fucking angry at Shitty for what he said.”

She scoops out some ice cream and plops it on top of her mooncake filling. “He should’ve never said that in the first place.”

“He shouldn’t have,” she repeats. She adds two dollops of Nutella to the mooncake filling and another spoonful of Chris’ ice cream and mashes all of it together. “I know that. I know what he said was bad, and I know how I reacted wasn’t out of nowhere, and I know I reacted like that because that moment was the tipping point after years and years of being made fun of for a funny middle name and smelly food and being stalked by creepy old men when I walked home from the bus stop.”

She puts a spoonful of the mixture in her mouth and chews. “I know all that, and to this day, I still wish that I had opened my mouth and said something. I still wish I had let Shitty have it, just so that I could have been able to eat that durian,” she says, and her voice is small. It breaks halfway through. “I know all that, and I still think it’s all my fault.”

Chris looks at her. Lardo looks back. Despite how she sounds, she is stoic, at least up until Chris scoots his chair closer to her and spreads out his left arm. With a shudder, she leans into his side and lays her head on his shoulder and sighs. He lets his arm fall to the seat of her chair, and she leans more of her weight on him.

“He’s an asshole,” Chris says.

“Yeah.”

“They’re all assholes.”

“Yeah.”

“Say something, and you’re the asshole. Say nothing, and they continue to be assholes.” Chris stuffs a spoonful of mooncake and ice cream in his mouth. Sweet and cold, it makes him almost forgive himself for taking it out on them. Almost. She shrugs in sympathetic defeat, and they eat in silence for a while.

“Fuck everything,” she says finally, before making grabby hands at his mooncake. “Come on, gimme some.”

“But it’s all mashed and yucky.”

“Friends don’t let friends eat mooncake by themselves.”

Chris snorts. “Very altruistic of you. And fine, if you don’t mind its… condition.”

“It strengthens the metaphor,” she says wisely, helping herself to his mooncake. “You know, the whole thing where you’re putting your own twist on how you experience your heritage, but it doesn’t always go smoothly, which explains the mash—”

“You’re talking out of your ass, and you know it.” Chris spoons out three globs of Nutella.

“Stick it between your teeth, and don’t let it choke you to death. Bon appétit, rinse and repeat,” Lardo continues, giving him a shit-eating grin, and Chris fucking _cackles_.

They demolish the rest of the mooncakes, Lardo’s Nutella, and half of Chris’ ice cream. Chris teases her about not being able to reach a shelf as they wash and dry all the stuff they used. Predictably, after she makes him apologize, Lardo also extracts a promise from Chris to buy her _three_ bottles of Nutella _and_ give her his mooncake tin to hold all her paper stars. Before they go back to their own rooms, Lardo gives him a hug and ruffles his hair, and he feels a pang in his chest when he remembers she’s graduating this year.

Chris ends up sleeping only three hours before he has to wake up for practice (and pound on Lardo’s door to get her up, too), but it’s the most well-rested he’s felt in weeks.

—

Chris raps his knuckles on the partially ajar door.

Wei Laoshi looks up and breaks into a smile. “周乐慧！请进，请进！中秋节快乐！吃过月饼了吗？” _[“Chris! Come in, come in! Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! Did you eat mooncake yet?”]_

He sits down and takes a proffered slice. “谢谢，老师。” He shifts in his chair. “你叫我来找你？” _[“Thank you, Professor. You told me to come see you?”]_

Wei Laoshi’s smile doesn’t fade, but her voice does become gentler. “我有点担心你，因为你的考试......” _[“I’m a little worried about you because your test…”]_

Chris puts a hand on the back of his neck. Right. Sure, a C+ was a little low, but he had been less familiar with the Lesson 2 material than he had thought. At least the Lesson 4 stuff had been a false alarm. “对不起，我最近一直都很忙—有很多功课，考试，而且有曲棍球练习……从现在起我会花更多时间来学习的。” _[“I’m sorry, I’ve been really busy this whole time—recently, I’ve had a lot of homework and exams, and I’ve had a lot of hockey practice, too… from now on, I’ll spend more time studying.”]_

She shakes her head. “我的意思是你看起来很累。你还好吗？” _[“What I mean is, you look really tired. Are you okay?”]_

 _Sorry I don’t speak Chinese. If you break her heart, we won’t hesitate._ _Moon pie. Why do you guys always ask him when he never knows_.

_To this day, I still wish that I had opened my mouth. Say something, and you’re the asshole. Say nothing, and they continue to be assholes. Fuck everything._

“我觉得有很大的......压力，” he says truthfully. _[“I feel like there’s a lot of… pressure.”]_

Wei Laoshi puts her hand over his in understanding and starts talking about parental pressures. He sits back, taking another piece of mooncake when she pushes the plate toward him, and listens to her talk, occasionally nodding, because he doesn’t have the energy (or language skills) to correct her.

She looks at him with pity. Chris knows what she sees—a Chinese American college student overwhelmed by overbearing parents, who has disappointed his family by not learning Chinese earlier and not excelling at it now, and who is collapsing under that pressure because he’s too Americanized to handle it.

Chris thanks her for her advice, most of which isn’t exactly pertinent. Then, he asks her about extra credit, Wintersession, and the Chinese minor. Her pitying smile turns into an excited one, and he smiles back.

—

“‘感恩节’，不是‘火鸡节’,” Wei Laoshi corrects him. _[“‘Thanksgiving,’ not ‘Turkey Day.’”]_ Chris’ ears burn in embarrassment; she’s about to tease him about translating from Cantonese to Mandarin again. And does that mean 火鸡节 is something only said in Cantonese, or something only his own family says? He hears Marie snicker behind him and doesn’t speak up for the rest of the class, which is sure to get him another concerned conversation with Wei Laoshi about his lagging performance.

Hausgiving is once again a big affair and makes him yearn for the quiet dinner they usually do at home. No one in the Chow household likes turkey, so they always get roast duck instead. To work off the ensuing food coma, Chris and Kay team up against Mom and Dad for some street hockey, and they always bemoan the fact that they can’t understand Mom and Dad’s plan of attack because it’s one of the only times their parents communicate solely in Cantonese with each other.

At the Haus, he feels like he’s interrupting a Norman Rockwell painting or an episode on a sitcom, which is a weird thought because he’s long accepted predominant whiteness in the American cultural consciousness as a fact of life and that that has no bearing on the validity of his own experiences.

However. It still doesn’t stop him from wondering—

Does he actually belong anywhere?

—

The room his counselor leads him to is small and cozy. The counselor herself is a white counseling-Ph. D-student-in-training, a full foot shorter than Chris. He has read her bio on the counseling center website two times. She’s an expert in diversity, supposedly (whatever that means).

He’s a little skeptical, but still hopes Wei Laoshi’s advice will pan out.

“I feel like I haven’t been able to fall or stay asleep for long, and I’m always on edge, waiting for someone to say something. I’ve been feeling like this for the past few months, ever since I moved in this year.”

“Like what?” Anna says.

“Like what my major is going to be or where I’m from. Like, I’m half-decided on majoring in compsci, but I don’t like telling people that because everyone always acts like they expected it, and it makes me uncomfortable, which is why I hate talking about it.” Chris fiddles with a tissue.

“Why do you think it makes you feel so uncomfortable?”

“Because it feels like… like I’m losing. Like every time someone finds out that I’m planning to major in compsci or that I’m taking Chinese, I feel like I’ve given the other person ammo because they then assume they know everything about me. I feel like all they see then is a Chinese guy, when I was born here and I don’t feel Chinese. Part of it might be internalized racism because I don’t want to be associated with the stereotypes people have about Chinese people, but also there’s this part of me that just feels like I’m not _allowed_ to identify as Chinese. At least not yet. If that makes sense.”

“Right,” Anna says. Chris takes that as a sign to continue.

“I’ve grown up and lived here all my life. My grandparents are always teasing me about how little Chinese I know, and it’s hard to reconcile that with everyone here making assumptions about me. There’s so much push and pull between Chinese and American culture for me that I don’t feel comfortable saying I’m both. Not to mention I kind of feel like I’m not worthy of being seen as Chinese at this point, when I really don’t know enough about Chinese culture. But then I get annoyed all over again that people are assuming things about me, so it’s like this never-ending cycle of feeling inadequate and also not wanting other people to stereotype me.”

“So it’s this culture clash, where you feel like the two sides of you are fighting.”

Chris blinks. Didn’t he only make a passing mention—if it could even be called that—to that in his word vomit? How did she—“Not really? Like I said, I’m not confident in identifying as or being seen as Chinese because I feel like I don’t know enough about Chinese culture to be able to do that. Like, I know I’m Chinese by blood and it can be a part of my identity if I want, but I never really thought about it until I came to Samwell. So it’s not like there are two sides of me. It’s more like… I’m American, and whatever is supposed to be my Chinese identity is tiny in size and doesn’t overlap within me at all, which is why it doesn’t feel like it’s mine. And sometimes I feel like both of them are throwing me out and I don’t belong. Like, I feel alienated due to my grandparents criticizing me for not being Chinese enough and strangers making racist comments because I’m too Asian and not American enough for them. All I want is for them to stop.” He thinks about Dex’s mom. “Especially the latter.”

“So to reiterate, your grandparents want you to be Chinese, but you’re more in tune with your American side, and you’re feeling a lot of pressure trying to balance making your family happy with learning Chinese and majoring in compsci, while also trying to be seen as yourself by other people as you do those things for your family. So there might be some friction between your American and Chinese sides because of the familial pressure. Perceptions of you—your own and those from everyone around you—have been changing, and the rest of you just hasn’t caught up yet, which might be why you’re feeling like you don’t belong right now. Does that make sense? You can tell me if I’m off.”

 “I guess?” Frankly, he’s a little more than confused because he’s pretty sure he’s brought up or alluded to racism at least twice, and she hasn’t done either even once yet. “I’m not really doing either of those for my family? I mean, I am a little bit, I guess, but it’s mostly for me. I know my grandparents are just teasing, so it’s not really like they’ve been pressuring me? I’m majoring in compsci and learning Chinese because _I_ want to.”

“Either way, in taking Chinese and majoring in compsci, you’ve placed yourself into two spaces where you don’t feel at home in. You’ve been busy, as Samwell students always are, so you’ve just been working on these two things and only spending time in these two spaces. But you’ve said that you don’t feel comfortable in either place, so let’s do some brainstorming now. What are some things you can do or join, so that you _do_ have comfortable spaces to go to?”

 _Why can’t these spaces I’m already in just become more comfortable instead_ , he thinks, but he knows she’s right. He hasn’t made that big of an effort to change anything; all he’s ever done is complain.

Why _can’t_ he just make those spaces more comfortable for himself? Why _can’t_ he just speak up and call out the racism when he sees it? Or better yet, why _can’t_ he just ignore what other people think of him? He himself knows he’s not the Chinese stereotype other people perceive him to be.

(Maybe it’s because while he knows that’s what he isn’t, he doesn’t know what he _is_.

Or maybe, these spaces just aren’t comfortable not because they’re the problem, but because _Chris_ is. He’s just too sensitive.)

She never brings up the racism, and he doesn’t go back.

—

“Wow, this is a lot,” Aunt Wil says over Skype, squinting at the photos of the textbook Chris sent to her. “And you’re supposed to learn all of this in three weeks?”

“Well. Two and a half, now. This is my only class, and it’s six hours a day. Three hours in the morning, a break for lunch, two more hours after that, and two tutors split our class in half for the last hour to do speaking practice. There’s only seven of us, so it’s easy for our professor to pinpoint our weaknesses and tailor the curriculum more specifically. She’s already sent us a revised syllabus, and today was our third day.”

“Damn,” Aunt Vivian whistles. “That sounds like Saturday Chinese school, but on steroids. AKA hell times five.”

“Yeah.” Chris rubs his eyes and yawns. “It’s one full semester’s worth of work in three weeks, covering the book that comes after the one I was using in the fall. I had to study Lesson 11—that’s the first chapter—on my own during Christmas break and take a quiz on that as soon as I walked into the classroom. Our professor’s goal is to finish at least up to Lesson 18 by the end of Wintersession, because that’s what the regular-term Chinese classes finish up to. But Wei Laoshi, the professor I had last term and freshman year, told me to also study Lesson 12 before Wintersession began, so that I could get a head start. Especially because Li Laoshi is supposed to be a lot more intense.”

“Is she?”

Chris laughs. “You could say that. She’s the one who teaches the intermediate and advanced heritage learners during the fall and spring, as well as the advanced Chinese literature classes, which is mandatory for all Chinese majors. Wei Laoshi teaches the non-native beginner and intermediate students, and she says her old students always come back to her complaining that Li Laoshi gives way too much homework.”

Aunt Vivian grimaces. “You’re braver than me, that’s for sure.”

“I mean, I get it? This Wintersession class is meant for people who want to study abroad in the spring but didn’t get enough language credits in time—I’m the only one doing it just so I can join the Advanced Intermediate class for the heritage speakers, which is also taught by her. She just wants to make sure everyone is prepared.”

“But you still have a lot of homework, even after spending all day in class, don’t you?”

“Yeah. We have workbook exercises every night and two 600-character essays a week. Plus a daily quiz, exam every Friday, and 10-minute presentation once a week. Mine’s tomorrow.”

“You’ll let us know if you need anything, right? Speaking practice, editing essays… any way we can help, we will.”

“Ahem,” Aunt Vivian says.

“Any way Ma or I can help,” Aunt Wil amends. “Not sure how helpful I’ll be, though, because I barely remember anything.”

“Are you going to survive this?” Aunt Vivian asks. “And I’m not saying this to tease you. It’s just, this Wintersession thing just seems like… a lot.”

“I want to do a study abroad program in Beijing this summer, though, and for the specific level I want to do, I have to get up to the advanced level, which means passing CHN 301 as a non-native speaker or CHN 204 for heritage learners. That means five semesters of Chinese for a non-native beginner like me, or four semesters for a heritage learner beginner, since they skip a semester and go straight to the second book of the Level 1 book. And I would rather study abroad in the summer, because I don’t want to be away for a full semester, and I still have a bunch of compsci classes I will need to take next year because this spring, I want to do Arts of Asia with Lardo before she graduates and Politics of Language with Nursey because that class is only offered every two years and I feel like we’ll be too busy to do it together in senior year.”

“Wow,” Aunt Wil says. She looks at him like she knows he’s still selling himself on this plan. “You’ve definitely thought a lot about this.”

“Yeah, I’m, like, not set on anything beyond the end of this summer yet. Even now, I’m just trying to find interesting classes that fulfill my distribution requirements and not worrying too much about my major, though I will most likely declare compsci. But that deadline’s in March, so I still have time. And I got the idea to do Wintersession from Wei Laoshi last year, actually. She kept asking me if I would consider moving up to Li Laoshi’s classes because she thought I’d be more comfortable there.” He thinks about last term’s study group chat. “I think that, too. It’ll help me finish my Chinese minor sooner and free up time for other electives, at least. Right now, when I imagine studying abroad in Beijing and remember that the program starts in less than six months, it doesn’t actually feel real, but it’ll start feeling like it when the date gets closer. Probably.”

“And you’ll still be doing hockey.”

“Yeah.” His forehead wrinkles, and he suddenly feels overwhelmed. “Oh yeah, and I also signed up to volunteer at an afterschool program for elementary school kids in Boston’s Chinatown for the spring. Once a week. Looking back… I just realized yes, this is a lot.” But it’d all be worth it to find spaces he’d finally feel comfortable in after talking it over with Anna, so he has to.

He doesn’t say any of that, though. He just gives them a self-deprecating smile.

“I’m serious about helping you,” Aunt Wil says. “I’m going to borrow your textbook from the library and study along with you. You can teach it to me. Teaching it to someone helps with memory retention, right? So it’ll be a win-win. I’ll be learning Chinese while helping you study.”

“That… would be really nice of you. Thank you.” Chris’ throat is tight.

“And you can totally practice your presentations on me. I wouldn’t be able to tell if you were legit or not, so it’s totally no pressure,” Aunt Vivian says. “You said you have one for tomorrow? How’s it going?”

“It’s okay. I did all my slides. I just need to figure out what I’m going to say.”

“Want to practice now?”

“Oh! Um, sure.” He reddens and laughs. “I think I’m more nervous about this than I thought.”

“You have 30 seconds to share your slides and organize your thoughts,” Aunt Vivian says sternly. She earns a gentle push from Aunt Wil.

“I thought you said presenting to you would specifically be _no_ pressure?” Aunt Wil asks.

“Ugh, fine. Only if my favorite mother-in-law’s cousin’s son promises to stay with us after Wintersession ends until the spring term begins,” Aunt Vivian says innocently, though she’s blushing a little because _affection_ and _sentimentality_ and _emotional vulnerability_.

Chris’ heart swells. He’d been planning to mope around the Haus until spring term began, but that’s way better. He really has to start remembering that there are people in his corner. “Sure. Only if my favorite aunts tell me where to get more of those sesame tangyuan. I ran out.”

“Okay, okay, enough talking. Time to get to work,” Aunt Wil says, and it’s enough to make him believe everything is going to work out.

—

 **kay-drama  
** +1 415-356-9833

—Feb 8—

 **1:10 AM** kay  
**1:10 AM** someone in my chinese class, the other canto person there  
**1:10 AM** just told me there’s like this tradition  
**1:10 AM** for everyone to stay up talking til midnight for LNY  
**1:11 AM** did you know about this

no **1:22 AM**

 **1:22 AM** why did the rents never tell us about this do you think

probably bc we were young then and shouldn’t be staying up so late??? which, AHEM **1:22 AM  
** why are you still up don’t you have class **1:23 AM  
** did you do anything for LNY tho **1:23 AM**

 **1:24 AM** right so  
**1:24 AM** did you know there’s like this tradition  
**1:25 AM** for everyone to stay up talking til midnight for LNY

… **1:25 AM  
** you want to do this that badly? **1:25 AM**

 **1:26** **AM** and yes i did. i couldn’t do the PAC-CSA LNY dinner bc of hockey  
**1:26 AM** so lardo (team manager) and i just ordered thai and called the team over to the haus  
**1:27 AM** next year i'm gonna befriend someone on the CSA e-board  
**1:27 AM** and convince them to make the dinner more hockey-friendly  
**1:27 AM** but apparently i didn’t miss much last year, according to the same girl from my chinese class  
**1:28 AM** food ran out fast and more white ppl attended than asians  
**1:28 AM** oh and she caught some white ppl doing squinty eyes in the photo booths last yr  
**1:29 AM** not to mention they also ruined all the brushes at the calligraphy station

 **  
** ew **1:29 AM**  
also it’s almost 1:30 for you **1:29 AM  
** you’re going to be so cranky tomorrow and then send me cranky texts **1:30 AM  
** telling me how cranky you are and blaming me for making you so cranky **1:31 AM  
** i know your game **1:32 AM  
** go to bed or i'll tell mom **1:32 AM**

 **1:33 AM** yeah but i didn’t know about the tradition until now  
**1:33 AM** and it’s past midnight for me already so i missed mine  
**1:34 AM** come on  
**1:34 AM** let me have this?

ughhhhhhhh yau mo gow tcaw ah lay deem gai gum ma fan ga **1:36 AM**  
[are you kidding me? why are you so annoying?]

 **1:37 AM** uh i don’t remember what that means

HA **1:37 AM**  
IT’S OFFICIAL I’M CALLING IT NOW **1:38 AM  
** AT 10:37 PM ON THE EVE OF LUNAR NEW YEAR IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2016 **1:38 AM  
** CHRIS FRANKLIN CHOW ADMITTED THAT HIS CANTONESE IS NOW WORSE **1:39 AM  
** THAN THAT OF HIS SISTER AND SAVIOR KAY CHOW **1:39 AM  
** this is the best day of my life, thank you **1:40 AM**

 **1:41 AM** in my DEFENSE, I JUST COMPLETED A SUPER INTENSIVE MANDARIN PROGRAM  
**1:41 AM** IN THREE WEEKS  
**1:42 AM** SO FORGIVE ME FOR FORGETTING MY CANTO

just for that, i'm changing your name to “can’to” in my phone **1:43 AM**

 **1:43 AM** HEY

Then, Chris’ phone suddenly rings. “Is someone dying?” he asks. “Also, I figured it out right before you called me.”

“I thought _you_ were dying!” Kay says. “I’m not changing your name in my phone back.”

“But you’re the one who called! And why the hell not?”

“Because it’s too much effort. Do you know how long it took to do that just now? Ten years. It’ll have to be another ten years before I exert that much effort again.” Kay clears her throat. “Anyway, don’t change the subject. I called because this is weird. Like, the whole… you know…”

“What whole ‘you know’?”

“I swear, if you make me say it out loud, you’re going to wish you were dead,” Kay says sweetly. “Come on. Is everything okay?”

“I’m fine. I promise.” He’s lying through his teeth.

“You’re lying through your teeth,” Kay tells him, but at least she drops it. She races downstairs and puts him on speaker, and he spends the next two hours catching up with Mom and Dad and Kay and his grandparents, who all keep telling him to go to bed, but he ignores them, watching the clock on his phone tick closer to 3:00 AM. He falls asleep at around 3:45 AM, but only because Kay starts playing some sleep-inducing playlist on YouTube, which is incredibly underhanded and creative and will require payback later.

When he wakes up, his phone is almost dead, and he’s apparently been drooling on it. Ugh.

_Sorry I don’t speak Chinese._

He thinks about all the aborted starts and how his mind kept frantically trying to form the words he needed but only the Mandarin came out and the way Kay was doing the translating between him and his grandparents for once. _Me neither._

 **6:15 AM** this is all your fault

WHAT DID I SAY **12:02 PM**

—

 **CHN 204 Study Group  
** 9:24 PM

 **Jane Wu**  
Does anyone remember the chengyu for messy all I remember is that half the characters are numbers  
Also can someone translate the passage about jingju

 **Michael Liu**  
i second the thing about beijing opera bc i didn’t get it at all **@Scott Zhao**

 **Delilah Lee**  
the idiom for messy is 乱七八糟 which i remember bc it’s the same for canto  
back me up on this **@Chris Chow**

 **Chris Chow**  
sounds familiar  
the beijing opera thing was about like the colors used for the masks and what kinds of characters they are

 **Jane Wu**  
So how do you use it

 **Chris Chow**  
what do you mean  
don’t you just idk stick the whole thing into a sentence

 **Jane Wu**  
I mean like part of speech

 **Chris Chow**  
adjective?

 **Jane Wu**  
We need **@Scott Zhao** for this

 **Sally Chen**  
Do you still need the 京剧 thing?

 **Michael Liu**  
yes please thank you

 **Sally Chen**  
There are two musical styles, 西皮 and 二黄  
They focus a lot on Chinese history and legends/folktales  
There are four kinds of roles (in the vocab list)  
Examples of color meanings: red is for loyal, white evil, black integrity  
This is all from memory, I’ll summarize the rest of it when I get back to my room

 **Scott Zhao**  
Sorry orchestra practice ran late. Yes 乱七八糟 is probably closest to being an adjective/adverb, but you need to add 的/地 respectively to do that (I think)  
My friend finally got back to me, I just emailed all of you the link to their study guide from last year. They wish us luck haha

 **Jane Wu**  
THANKS SCOTT YOU’RE THE BEST

—

Chris enjoys Li Laoshi’s class more than Wei Laoshi’s, no question. But the answer to how _much_ more ends up being disappointing, which is to say, the margin by which he does is… not a lot.

He doesn’t open up his Messenger app to find dozens of notifications informing him of his study group tagging him to ask for help anymore, which. Great. Because it had been getting a little awkward that he didn’t always know the answer and Gillian invariably always brought up how Chinese just _clicked_ for her, despite her not being Chinese and still being able to excel at (and major in) Chinese with no issues.

Now, though, he’s improved considerably, with the memories of Wintersession still fresh in his mind, but everyone kind of just ignores him and Delilah or just outright says knowledge of Cantonese isn’t going to be helpful in this situation (more so to Delilah than Chris).

Then there are the cultural/generational differences—Chris finds out quickly in their class of six that he’s the only second-generation one here when they’re supposed to write and read aloud their essays about their experiences with parental pressure and their opinions on how it’s influenced their academic success. He’s the only one who writes about _not_ having really experienced that because his parents had always been conscious about not pushing him or Kay too hard after growing up with it themselves.

At least Delilah is here to back him up when he brings up Yun-Yut this year.

—

“今天的话题：其他国家的人是如何看待中国人？” Li Laoshi turns and looks at them all expectantly. _[“Today’s topic: How do people from other countries view Chinese people?”]_

“中国人没有礼貌,” Michael says, fiddling with his pen. _[“Chinese people have no manners.”]_

“中国人很聪明，只在乎念书,” Sally says next, when Li Laoshi looks at her. _[“Chinese people are very smart and only care about studying.”]_

“还有呢？“ Li Laoshi asks, when no one else seems keen on contributing, which, to be fair, it _is_ 8:30 in the morning. _[“Anything else?”]_

“中国人喜欢吃狗,” Scott says finally. _[“Chinese people like eating dog.”]_

“我真的不懂为什么那么多人说中国人喜欢吃狗，只有广东人吃狗。我也不懂 ‘广东人喜欢吃狗’ 是如何变成 ‘全中国人都喜欢吃狗’。这不是对的，世界上的人不应该这样看待所有的中国人；我最讨厌这个刻板印象的概念,” Jane rants, rolling her eyes. _[“I really don’t get why so many people say Chinese people like eating dog when only Cantonese people eat dog. I also don’t understand how ‘Cantonese people like eating dog’ became ‘all Chinese people like eating dog’. It’s not right, the world should not view all Chinese people like this; I hate this stereotype the most.”]_

Chris and Delilah exchange a look.

“因为他们认为每个中国人都一样,” Sally replies. _[“Because they think every Chinese person is the same.”]_

 “你是不是在说广东人不应该吃狗？你们刚刚都说每个中国人是不同的，你怎么能够说每个广东人都会吃狗？“ Delilah says, and her voice is shaky. _[“Are you saying Cantonese people shouldn’t eat dog? You all just said every Chinese person is different—how can you also say that every Cantonese person eats dog?”]_

“是我妈妈告诉我的。广东人什么都吃,” Sally says. _[“My mother told me. Cantonese people will eat anything.”]_

Li Laoshi tries to steer them back to the main topic, but everyone except Chris and Delilah starts talking about where they’ve heard it from.

Chris grits his teeth as the topic shifts to some article a journalist wrote about visiting China and sampling dog. His whole body tenses when Jane asks Li Laoshi for the name of the festival during which dog is eaten. His fists clench when Michael poses the question of how dog is cooked and laughs when the other three make faces. He sees red when Scott agrees with Jane that it’s unfair that the dog-eating stereotype has been generalized to all Chinese people.

Li Laoshi asks him to elaborate. Scott replies that it always comes up when he’s talking to his white friends and that he’s tired of explaining that his family is from Shanghai, not Guangdong.

“周乐慧，你呢？你想法是什么？你还什么都没说,“ Li Laoshi says. _[“Chris, how about you? What do you think? You haven’t said anything yet.”]_

“我认为—” Chris says, and stops. His thoughts are too jumbled for him to put into Mandarin, and he can feel the panic rising in his chest. _[“I think—“]_

Li Laoshi shushes Jane when she tries to cut in.

Chris tries again, but all that comes out is the kind of sigh that shudders as soon as it’s released, the kind that immediately precedes a sob. His vision is slightly blurry, so he rubs at his eyes; his fingers come back slightly damp. Shit. All these words and emotions are threatening to spill out of him, and it’s all he can do to keep them in and push them back down to the soles of his feet, seeping into the ground underneath, so that they only ever try to escape when he’s standing in that same exact spot again. Never mind that there are so many tiles of wooden floorboard and carpet and concrete pavement where he’s already pushed so much of it down that it’s getting harder and harder to find a free space. If this were bingo, he’d already have won at least four times over.

无论怎么样，结果都一样。 _[No matter what, the result is the same.]_

Finally, Chris gives up on trying to articulate it in Mandarin. “I don’t know if that stereotype is true, but. Anyway. You sound like you’re saying that Cantonese people are to blame for this stereotype and that it’s okay to stereotype some Chinese people, just not all. I don’t have anything else to add.”

The room is silent, and suddenly, Chris knows he’s not going to minor in Chinese anymore. Nor is he going to study abroad in Beijing for the summer.

He knows this space isn’t for him.

He knows all this, and it feels freeing, for once (though he imagines the guilt of failing to be a Good Chinese Person will seep in soon enough).

People start filling up the hallways outside. Chris throws his pencil case and notebook in his bag.

“我们可以走了吗？“ Chris asks Li Laoshi politely, who just nods. _[“Can we leave now?”]_

As Chris leaves the classroom, he suddenly feels dizzy, and his head pounds.

“Wait!”

He turns around.

“You okay?” Delilah asks quietly.

Chris laughs. “Not really. Are you also heading to South Quad?”

“Yeah.” She’s quiet for a moment.

 “I was so close to losing it,” he admits.

“You think _you_ were bad? I was about to snap their necks in half.”

“I would’ve helped you,” Chris says. “Why the fuck didn’t Li Laoshi stop them?”

“I know, right? What even was the point of today’s class?”

“Waste of time,” Chris agrees. He spots Lardo sitting somewhere in the middle of the classroom to the left of them. She’s reserved him a seat. “This is me.”

“I just wanted to say I wish I’d spoken up, too.”

“But you did. Even managed to say it in the language we were supposed to,” Chris jokes.

Delilah shakes her head. “Not like you. I’ll see you.”

“Hey,” Chris calls after her. She looks back. “It means a lot that you said that. It makes me feel like I wasn’t just making something out of nothing, so thanks, Delilah. You’re in Cait’s sociology class, aren’t you? Do you want to hang out with us during lunch? We’re going to get boba.”

“Deely,” she corrects him. “That would be perfect, actually, because our midterm is today. Want to help us study during lunch?”

“Ugh, if I have to,” Chris grins. “See you there.”

After Delilah—no, _Deely_ —leaves, Chris’ bravado fades. He’s clammy when he goes into the classroom, and Lardo gives him an inquisitive look, but he doesn’t say anything. He just retreats into himself, replaying what happened in Chinese class all day, until he comes back to himself to find himself sitting on his bed at the end of the day and staring out the window, with no memory of anything that transpired in between whatsoever.

He really hadn’t been serious about going through with it, had he. About spending the summer studying Chinese in Beijing, declaring a Chinese minor, making good on his promise to himself or to his family to connect more deeply with Chinese culture. Taking a huge step forward in reconciling his American identity with his nascent Chinese one.

Full moon again. Foggy, too.

Chris wonders if that’s what a crying heart looks like.

—

Chris has to stifle his own giggle (and cringe) when he hears Katie whisper “Nay hai yut gaw ham sup lo” _[“You are a perverted guy”]_ to Calvin, who retorts, “No, _nay_ hai yut gaw ham sup lo!” Then they both start laughing and chasing other kids around the schoolyard and shouting the same thing after them, which of course prompts almost the whole class of eight second graders into doing it.

“We should probably tell them to knock it off,” Chris says to his co-volunteer teacher Iris, who is also vice president of the Boston Chinatown afterschool program.

Iris, who is Taiwanese Canadian and knows a little Cantonese but (un)fortunately not enough, tenses. Her eyes narrow. “What are they saying.”

“I’m not sure you really want to know.” Chris chuckles a little. “My friends and I went through this same phase when we were little, and that was more than ten years ago. Why is this such a rite of passage for Canto kids? Why? This and ‘pok gai’.” _[“Drop dead / Go to hell.”]_

“I’ll take your word for it.” She starts heading inside the school. “I need to go call Kelly’s parents to come get her because she said her throat is itchy. By the way, do you know the word for ‘itchy’ in Cantonese?”

“This one I always get confused with the verb ‘to itch.’” He feels his face redden because this is _not_ the time for him to get caught in another spiral that just keeps flashing “CAN’TO” in his head over and over again, the letters largening upon every appearance.

And yet… and yet.

“IT’S ‘HUN,’” Sid shouts as he runs past, before joining the fray again, which thankfully breaks Chris out of his reverie.

“Thank you!” Iris shouts after him. “And stop saying that! It’s not nice!”

“Five more minutes outside, and then we go back in!” Chris calls out, ignoring the groans and glares they’re throwing at him for tattling to Iris.

His eyes fall onto Ming, a new addition to the program who only immigrated to the U.S. a few months ago and is the only one in the class who knows neither English nor Cantonese. Ming stands alone by the wall in the shade, watching the rest of them run around in circles.

What a mood, Chris lets himself think, and walks over to him.

—

Iris ropes him into acting as a translator between the students’ parents and the head volunteer teachers for their super casual parent teacher conference, which runs pretty late because he’s the only one translating tonight (coincidentally, Deely is the translator for tomorrow evening), so they all grab dinner together in Chinatown. It’s sad how proud of himself he feels for being able to do the bare minimum in the translations.

Chris impresses everyone except Iris with his ability to successfully pick up the xiao long bao using his chopsticks, eschewing the pair of tongs. She’s even less impressed after proving she can do it, too, because everyone else makes the both of them get their xiao long bao for them.

“Are you even Cantonese?” Iris jokes, when Chris declines to drink the soup (he misses soup, but not _that_ much, and anyway, Popo’s words about only drinking soup made at home still ring true for him). His smile shutters closed.

Chris ducks out before the rest of them because Hing Shing is closing in 20 minutes, and he’d promised the team he’d bring back Chinese bakery bread for them. Also, this way, he has an excuse to return to campus by T, not the car; it’s bad enough that he always exits the car the fastest as soon as they arrive at the afterschool program site, but sitting inside the car after the program ends for the day when the door slams is infinitely worse.

He’s just finished buying out the bakery (for a third of what it would’ve cost usually—score!) and is heading for the T, when a middle-aged white woman with curly brown hair stops him. “Excuse me, could I ask you for directions?”

“Sorry, I don’t know this area well myself.”

As he passes her, he hears her mutter something that suspiciously sounds a lot like, “But don’t you live here?”

“What did you say?” Later, he’ll freak out about his audacity, but right now, he’s only proud that his voice is steady.

She gives him an indifferent glance and smirks, like she knows she’s going to go unchallenged. “You heard me.”

Like all those other times, he feels it rise within him. Boil, really. All the words, emotions, _everything_. It surges up from inside him so quickly that he actually flinches, just the tiniest bit.

Then, he exhales with his mouth, and suddenly, he’s _laughing._ His whole body shakes with it. “Thank you.”

“ _Thank_ _you?_ You’re out of your mind,” she says, backing away. He makes no move to get closer, just raises his voice.

“ _Thank you_ , because every single white person this past year has been making assumptions about what kind of Asian I am and they always assume I’m from Asia, or China, actually, because it’s all the same to you racists. _However_. However! You’re the first white person to assume I’m from here, as in, to correctly assume that I’m from the U.S. You’re the first white person to _recognize_ that I am both Asian and American. Kind of. I mean, it’s racist of you to assume all Asians are from Chinatown, and there’s no way you could actually tell if I was Chinese or something else, but I have to admit you’re also right, in a way. I _am_ both, so why do I keep denying it? Why did it take someone like you being racist for me to realize this? But I’ll take what I can get for now, since _the bar is already so low._ So yes, I do mean, with all of my heart, _thank you._ ”

“Fuck you!” she says, giving him the finger, but he pays her no attention. The T is coming in four minutes, and _ohgodhereallydidjustdothat._

—

Li Laoshi emails everyone an apology immediately after the disastrous class discussion, but Chris doesn’t read it until a week after, because the email preview also says something about the summer study abroad program, and he hasn’t exactly processed the sudden change in a plan he’s had for months yet.

Turns out he has no choice in putting it off any longer, though, because Li Laoshi corners him after class one day. He blames his distracted state of mind on feeling too satisfied at hearing the rest of the class take turns apologizing to him and Deely.

“周乐慧。“ _[“Chris.”]_

He gives her a guilty smile. “老师好。“ _[“Hi, Professor.”]_

“我还没有收到你的留学申请。你忘记了吗？“ _[“I still haven’t received your study abroad application. Did you forget?”]_

“我没有忘记。我不想去了,” he says quietly. _[“I didn’t forget. I don’t want to go anymore.”]_

“你改变主意跟上个星期的……讨论有没有关系？” she asks almost hesitantly, after a moment. _[“Does you changing your mind have anything to do with… the discussion from last week?”]_

“没有，没有,” he tries to say reassuringly. _[“No, no.”]_

She gives him a look.

“一点,” he amends. _[“A little.”]_

“我很抱歉—” _[“I’m_ really _sorry.”]_

“有很多原因；并不是因为上个星期发生的事情。我大学开始学中文是因为我觉得是时候。开始我很喜欢；我让我的家人很开心，而且我也能够不用词典或者用英文就可以和我爷爷奶奶对话。我知道因为我说广东话，我比别人要满，这也是为什么我花很多时间学习和联系，但是有时我觉得我在做无用功；无论怎么样，结果都一样。我睡得不好，我觉得我没有进步，我没有空闲，而且我的广东话没有好得能和我的爷爷奶奶对话。唯一的区别是现在当我不知道一件事用广东话怎么说时，我用国语说而不是英文。所以至少，我想休息一下，然后看我明年是否继续学中文—如果我继续的话。“ _[“There were a lot of things; it wasn’t just because of what happened last week. I started taking Chinese in college because I felt like it was about time I did. I really enjoyed it at the beginning; I was making my family so happy, and I felt like I was actually able to talk to my grandparents without switching to English or looking up a dictionary for once. I know I’ve been at a disadvantage compared to everyone else because I speak Cantonese, which is why I spend a lot of time studying and practicing, but sometimes it feels like I’m doing it all for nothing, that no matter what I do, the result is the same. I haven’t been sleeping well, I don’t feel like I’m improving, I don’t have much free time, and I still don’t know enough Cantonese to have a whole conversation with my grandparents. The only difference is that whenever I don’t know how to say something now, I say it in Mandarin, not English. So at the very least, I want to take a break and see whether I want to continue learning Chinese next year—or at all, really.”]_

“好的,” she says, giving him a sympathetic smile. He relaxes. ”我觉得你对自己太严格。我知道我取笑你用广东话来说你不知道用国语说的事，但是我认为这是你的强项；很明显你经常在想广东话与国语之间的联系，而且你已经很会猜广东话和国语的共同点。我对你这过去几个月来的进步非常骄傲；你从冬假的第一天以来已经成长了很多。明年到我办公室来，好吗？不管你下一步做什么，我都为你加油！“ _[“I don’t think you give yourself nearly enough credit. I know I tease you about how you use Cantonese to figure out how to say things you don’t know in Mandarin, but I believe it’s one of your strengths; you’re clearly always thinking about the connections between Cantonese and Mandarin, and you’ve gotten pretty good at guessing when the Cantonese parallels the Mandarin. I’m very proud of all the progress you’ve made these past few months; you’ve come a long way since the first day of Wintersession. Come by my office next year, okay? No matter what you do next, I’m cheering you on!”]_

Chris’ throat grows tight, and so does the lump in his chest. It’s going to be a while before he’s okay with how he gave up on his plan to form a meaningful relationship with Chinese culture, and he’s actually going to miss all those hours he used to spend practicing how to write Chinese vocabulary, but he has to put himself first, and that means he needs to first find a way to reconcile being American and being Chinese without feeling like it’s a zero-sum game.

He knows that now, thanks to that white lady who asked him for directions in Chinatown. He knows now that the Chinese part of him doesn’t take away from or negate the American part of him.

Now, he just needs to _understand_.

—

 **Major 1:** Computer Science  
**Major 2:** None  
**Minor:** None

—

Lardo graduates, and his eyes are not dry the entire day. No more knowing that Lardo is just a knock away whenever he feels ashamed or homesick, no more swapping mooncake during Mid-Autumn Festival, no more passing notes in Arts of Asia, no more late-night chats about diaspora angst and forays-turned-spirals-turned binges of Asian American YouTube and hate-reads of nearby Asian restaurants’ Yelp reviews by white patrons and everything else in between.

“You better not forget I exist, asshole,” Lardo tries to say threateningly, but the effect is ruined by the tears in her eyes and the cracking of her voice.

“Never.” Chris hugs her tight, ignoring how the sharp corner of her graduation cap digs into his shoulder. He lets go to make two peace signs and touches his pointer fingers together. “We’re frat bros for life!”

“Frat bros for life!” Lardo echoes with the same hand gesture, before her mom finally calls for her to get in the car.

He stays outside long after her car leaves, long after the sun sets and the moon makes an appearance, even though he still needs to pack and he has an early flight the next morning.

Bright, full, and foggy. He’s getting sick of those.

 

* * *

**CHAPTER 2 NOTES**

  * If you were thinking about [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoNufLX9O_I%20) wrt Vivian serenading Wil, you would be correct  
  

  * Chris moves in on Aug. 16, 2015 bc the [first mention](https://twitter.com/omgcheckplease/statuses/637280347017736192) Bitty makes of the frogs is on Aug. 20, but I figured Wil and Vivian probably moved him in on a weekend, since that's more convenient, so I chose the weekend before the tweet. But Chris also might have actually moved in earlier bc the year after that, [Chris moved in on Aug. 6, 2016](http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/post/142644954797). ……… and I just realized that bc Chris moves in early for hockey, while Dex’s mom would’ve still said racist stuff, the campus wouldn’t be nearly as crowded as I described. We are going to pretend I did not have that realizasian and that the scene I wrote is plausible  
  

  * PRNDL: throwback to Suite Life of Zack and Cody, which had London Tipton played by Brenda Song in it. she was one of the first Asian American actresses I had ever heard of, so here’s to my #roots
  * Ginglymostoma cirratum: scientific name for nurse shark  
  

  * Everyone’s phone numbers are the rejection hotlines for the place they’re from. Also Chris uses an android phone I think so hopefully I have the texting format right  
  

  * [Mid-Autumn Festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival) happens on the full moon and people eat mooncake  
  

  * Vivian’s dyslexia: not canon, but I wanted to to put this in bc Asian Americans are often misdiagnosed or ignored re: stuff like this bc of the stereotype that they’re smart and thus don’t need help  
  

  * FYG = first-year guide. I hc that Nursey was probably tapped to be some kind of ~diversity guide~ at Andover, in order to convince more prospective students of color to go there, and even though he had Thoughts abt being one of their token minority representatives, he did enjoy connecting w/ other students of color, esp younger ones, and I think he’d enjoy doing that at Samwell as well (but does he actually have time for that with all that hockey? no idea)  
  

  * Nursey’s moms are from my [hockey science au](https://archiveofourown.org/series/493942) (sorry I keep bringing this up a;dfj;al), and they like to choose a random veg/fruit every month and bake/cook w/ it, as a way to be healthy and also troll Nursey. This time it was fig. Noelle is Nursey’s maman and a doctor, and she works at the same hospital as Wil  
  

  * Compsci = what my hs calls computer science  
  

  * Re: the thing w/ the archway and Dex’s mom – This incident was the main reason I even hatched the idea for this fic and I think I was feeling anxious about writing it bc I didn’t want to relive it [yet again], which is why I kept putting it off, but I really needed to bc it was an important defining moment of my college years. I’d been living in a pretty sheltered, heavily Asian American/Asian immigrant environment and going to college was honestly a culture shock (like how Chris experiences Samwell in part 1) and thru/o my first year, I was quickly learning wow ppl can be really fucking racist.  
  
But then this thing happened in my 2nd yr and that’s when I realized, idk, like the whole world is racist, not just my college, like it wasn’t just an unfortunate accident that I happened to find myself in a really racist college, and that my classmates were obv getting some of that racism from their parents, that this kind of thing happens everywhere. When that white lady shouted at me, it was the first time I felt truly unsafe on campus, and I figured that Chris might have, like me, dealt with microaggressions before, where you aren’t completely sure they’re being racist or not, but maybe not have had such an overtly, aggressive experience w/ someone shouting at him like that before. idk. And I had him not able to respond bc that’s one of the biggest frustrations of experiencing them—where you’re at a loss as to how to react bc you don’t want to make things awk or unsafe for yourself but you still feel like you need to say something and then you get angry about not having said something  
  

  * Chinese minor: he canonically is [taking Chinese](http://omgcheckplease.wikia.com/wiki/Chris_Chow) but I doubt it’s all that straightforward, like I have my own complicated relationship with Chinese esp since classes only teach mando and yadda yadda yadda. But I remember being all for it after my first yr of Chinese and really wanting to minor and I was all excited about it bc I felt like I was finally taking the “right” step (spoiler: there is no right step) forward in being Chinese American.  
  
But then I ended up feeling the reverse in that I hated taking Chinese and I hated how everyone kept conflating Chinese and mando and how much of a failure I felt for not knowing mando and not behaving/thinking/etc Chinese (whatever that means). So I figured, why not let Chris have his own complicated relationship with Chinese? Tho I will say that this is only based on my own experiences and I’m not speaking for every Chinese American person and I am def not trying to guilt anyone into learning heritage/family’s language or saying every Chinese American's relationship with Chinese is like this/complicated  
  

  * Lucy Liu on ['fuck you' money](http://yiduiqie.tumblr.com/post/49678378442/a-lucy-liu-b-if-you-are-able-to-do-it-and-it)  
  

  * Re: microaggressions—the thing about these is these tiny ‘isolated’ incidents build up, right, so I wanted to show w/ Chris asking himself ‘has Dex always talked like this?’ as him now noticing it bc he’s just experienced this partic big microaggression, and so he’s on guard. Like if you keep experiencing them, you’re going to start approaching life w/ caution. So he’s tense, he’s just gotten a wake-up call abt racism and he doesn’t want to go thru it again, so he’s tense now. he’s gonna have to put in work to calm his reflexes bc he doesn’t want other ppl to think he hates all white ppl/is paranoid, which is gonna be hard to do bc of what he just experienced, but goodness is he gonna try  
  

  * Xie xie = thank you in Mandarin (why do they always do that? I’ve had non-Asian people—strangers—say hello/thank you to me in Japanese, Mandarin, and Korean when we’d just been speaking in English or while I’m just walking down the street so many times)  
  

  * [Mooncake tin](https://clarizzamarcelo.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/dsc08067.jpg?w=768&h=576) (There are four mooncakes in a tin)  
  

  * The kind of mooncake that Chris describes to Bitty is only one kind out of many variations both within and outside of China   
  

  * Just because Bitty's great at baking American things doesn't mean he's great at everything  
  

  * Bitty calling mooncake “moon pie” actually did happen to me and to this day I’m still kind of annoyed  
  

  * Mooncake with ice cream is one of my favorite things  
  

  * Char siu is canto for bbq pork  
  

  * The Chinese class group chats are meant to be fb messenger  
  

  * Did I look up the curriculum for ch4 from  _Integrated Chinese_  [level 2 part 1](https://www.cheng-tsui.com/browse/textbooks/integrated-chinese-third-edition/integrated-chinese-level-2-part-1-3rd-ed-textbook?id=20680) for the group chat part? perhaps (at least I didn’t have to lie about which grammar thing I found most confusing)  
  

  * Yes Gillian is a sinaboo (like a weeaboo but someone who’s obsessed with/fetishizes Chinese culture)  
  

  * Fish tanks containing live fish and shellfish [to be cooked for customers later] are a common sight in Chinese restaurants  
  

  * Re: the scene where Lardo and Chris eat each other’s mooncake late at night—I’m not sure how long mooncake keeps (Mid-Autumn Festival was 9/27/16; the night the scene takes place is Chris’ birthday, which is 10/10), so I’m taking artistic license here  
  

  * Mid-Autumn Festival is celebrated by both Chinese and Vietnamese people, but the kinds of mooncakes they eat are different  
  

  * [Snow skin mooncake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_skin_mooncake), ma raison d'etre  
  

  * “Stick it between your teeth, and don’t let it choke you to death” Lardo butchers [that meme from tfios](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/its-a-metaphor), which, in her defense (and mine) it was 3 am.  
  

  * Wei Laoshi is the same prof Chris had for Chinese class last year and from the start she’s always expected him to be better than the rest of the [non-Chinese] class  
  

  * Laoshi = mando for teacher [professor in this context]   
  

  * There are “lists” that come in four (an unlucky number bc it sounds the same as the word for 'death') thru/o the fic, which I thought would be appropriate for all the bad/negative things. “ _Sorry I don’t speak Chinese._ ” x4 is an example of that  
  

  * 火鸡节 is literally “turkey day” and apparently not an acceptable way to say Thanksgiving in mando?? according to my prof at least  
  

  * The Norman Rockwell painting is  _Freedom from Want_  
  

  * Re: Chris’ experience at the counseling center—as a psych major, I think about [this](http://weareallmixedup.tumblr.com/post/126205572010/when-asian-american-students-seek-therapytheir) a lot (it’s why everyone else seems to think that the things Chris is feeling are all caused by parental pressure, specifically the kind of parental pressure that is often seen in Chinese culture / blaming it all on Chinese culture when that’s not the case for Chris, since his parents don’t exert that kind of pressure on him). It also builds off [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/156065967319/chowder-hc-depression) (am I just recycling all my old hcs into this fic? perhaps)  
  

  * Chris doesn’t go back to the counseling center after that and part of it might be due to the lack of [racial match](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4228688/): “Racial match, or concordance, has been described as one element of culturally responsive care and a potential factor in reducing mental health disparities for ethnic minorities. Racial/ethnic match occurs when mental health clients and providers share the same race or ethnicity.”    
  
He probably would have felt more comfortable with an Asian American counselor or counselor of color (or if that counselor had stopped to actually listen to him. Am I projecting my own experiences onto him again? perhaps)  
  

  * The book Chris is learning from during Wintersession is Integrated Chinese [level 2 part 2](https://www.cheng-tsui.com/browse/textbooks/integrated-chinese-third-edition/integrated-chinese-level-2-part-2-3rd-ed-textbook?id=20681). Had he not done Wintersession (an intensive class held during three weeks in January), he would have just used this book in the spring of sophomore year. However, he does Wintersession so that he can catch up to the heritage learners class (heritage learners are the ones who grew up speaking Mandarin but don’t really know how to read or write). The heritage track class is a semester ahead of the class Chris took in the fall, so he was able to catch up and join Li Laoshi’s class because he accelerated his learning with Wintersession (I know it was really rambley in this bit so I hope this makes it clearer)  
  

  * Sesame tangyuan – a Chinese dessert of glutinous rice balls with black sesame paste inside and served in a bowl of condensed milk or something like that  
  

  * Tradition of staying up until midnight for Lunar New Year: I didn’t know about this until this year, hence why Chris conveniently chooses to do it this year and it wasn’t mentioned last year/ch1  
  

  * LNY: Lunar New Year  
  

  * CSA: Chinese Students’ Association  
  

  * Kay says "yau mo gow tcaw ah lay deem gai gum ma fan ga" [are you kidding me? why are you so annoying?] and originally I said "nay" not "lay" (Canto for the word "you"). This is something most of you will not care about, but the reason I've since changed the 'N' to an 'L' is because I only recently realized that Cantonese in Hong Kong and in Guangzhou have slight pronunciation differences, one of which is the tendency for Hong Kong Cantonese speakers to use the 'L' sound instead of the 'N' sound [technically the "correct" way to say it for prescriptivists] for some words (a friend told me it's called 懶音 or "lazy sounds" when people do that), such as the word "you". More on that [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_Cantonese_pronunciation)  
  
My family is mostly from Guangzhou, which is why I originally said 'nay' and didn't think twice about it. However, I've been working on the third chapter (i.e., inventing new family members and more of Chris' backstory), which is why I've changed it to 'lay.' In a tweet I can't find right now, Chris' dad is canonically from Hong Kong/moved to the US from Hong Kong when he was a teen I think? (either 0.5-gen or 1.5-gen Chinese American, depending on whether you're going by generations born in the US or generations lived in the US, while Chris' mom was born in the US. I've made Chris' mom's side of the family Cantonese from Guangzhou, which is why 'nay' is used in Chris' mom's text to him in ch1.   
  
In my hc, both sets of grandparents took care of Chris and Kay when they were young, and there was an additional caretaker for Chris when he was a baby while his parents were still pursuing their degrees: Chris' aunt/his dad's older sister. Chris' dad's side is from Hong Kong, so while I believe that with the mix of Hong Kong Cantonese pronunciation and Guangzhou Cantonese pronunciation in their house, Chris and Kay both use the 'N' and 'L' sounds for certain words interchangeably; it really just depends on who they've been conversing with (i.e., whose pronunciation they've just heard bc that's who they're going to mirror). However, for Chris (and to a lesser extent, Kay), because his aunt took care of him when he was a baby [speaking in both Cantonese and English], Chris and Kay  _both_ have a slight preference for the 'L' sound over the 'N' sound. Chris because of his aunt, Kay because of hearing Chris speak in Cantonese.  
  
Anyway, so that was a really long explanation for something really tiny but I just wanted to talk about why the change and get more detailed about the way Chris speaks Cantonese


  * Kay says it’s 10:37 PM (and not 1:37 AM like the timestamp) because of the time zone difference (she’s in California)  
  

  * Kay calls Chris at 1:43 AM, which is when the phone convo with his family to observe the staying-up-til-midnight LNY tradition begins. 143 = I love you. For the most part, the time stamps of things are random, but if you see anything that begins/ends at 1:43 or 4:20 (4:20 makes its way into a few things in hockey science au dal;skjdf;lajk), those were definitely intentional  
  

  * On Kay not changing Chris’ name again in her phone—she’s the kind of person who changes all her settings on her phone (ringtone, alarm clock song/tone, unlock code, etc) once every ~3 years and then refuses to touch it again because she doesn’t remember how. One time she decided to make “Baby” by Justin Bieber her alarm to annoy Chris, but she ended up getting annoyed by it, too (she always hits snooze at least 7 times), but she wouldn’t let Chris help her change the song, so they lived with it for 3.5 years. Nowadays, their eyes twitch upon hearing the song, and they have an unspoken truce to never, ever play that song, not even for irony during karaoke.  
  

  * Chengyu - 成语, literally means “set phrases” and are Chinese four-character idioms (tho rarely, I think some are eight characters) and are the bane of my existence because there are so many of them and they are all so hard to remember  
  

  * Did I dig up my old Chinese book/notes from my own soph yr spring Chinese class to make them freak out about Beijing opera? Perhaps  
  

  * Second-generation here means ‘second generation to be born in the U.S.’ [and is the same as ‘third generation to _live_ in the U.S.’], making Chris’ other classmates first-generation as in, ‘first generation to be born in the U.S.’ or ‘second generation to _live_ in the U.S.’  
  

  * The scene where Chris’ Chinese class is discussing stereotypes about Chinese people was inspired by the time one of my not-canto classmates joked that all canto ppl are drunkards. So I was kinda shocked bc 1) I didn’t know about the stereotype and 2) I didn’t—and probably still don’t, even after my googling to find a stereotype to use for their class discussion—know many stereotypes about canto ppl other than that the language canto is seen as vulgar and lower-class than mando. And I had no idea the ‘Chinese people eat dogs’ stereotype was first about canto ppl and then got generalized to all Chinese people. Th dog-eating stereotype made me feel the worst while reading about it in online forums, which is why it ended up being the one I chose to include (not to mention that it’s a pretty well-known stereotype and not just a stereotype popular within China)  
  

  * I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this article where a journalist eats dog for the first time, but I remember seeing it in the back of a magazine ( _Time_?) when I was in like middle school? So like a little over 10 years ago? But anyway that’s the one the class is talking about  
  

  * Speaking of middle school, is Delilah "Deely" Lee an old self-insert-esque OC of mine? perhaps (I mean, to be fair, she never had a fleshed-out personality or a nickname until now, so she's not that much of a self-insert. probably)  
  

  * As I was reading thru this again to write up notes/commentary, I just realized I don’t actually know a lot of canto profanity outside of the two I put here and that I never knew the meaning of pokgai and it didn’t occur to me until this fic that I could have googled it?? I have memories of hearing other kids whisper these curses to each other and thinking these words were Super Powerful and gasping in shock and thinking we were all going to die (despite not really knowing what any of them meant). I think I might have read somewhere that they’re relatively tame for profanity??  
  

  * The majority of Boston Chinatown is canto and my own alma mater has a volunteer afterschool program serving this population, which is why I gave it to Samwell as well. This scene builds off of this [hc](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/154563432389/thinking-about-chowder-volunteering-at-a-free) and my own desire to have him do some [language brokering](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/research/featured-research/child-language-brokering)  
  

  * Not sure if other bakeries do this, but many Chinese bakeries cut their prices after a certain hour (like 6-6:30 PM maybe? I forgot) because the bread is no longer as fresh as it was that morning and they want to sell off the rest of their baked goods before they close for the day, so if a bun is usually $1.20, they might say you can buy 3-4 of that bun for that amount after a certain time, usually a few hours before closing  
  

  * Iris asks “Are you even Cantonese?” because soup is a huge thing in canto cuisine (canto people are known for really enjoying soup and also making good soup), which is why it’s ironic [to other people] that Chris doesn’t like soup (I mean like if you’re made to drink it every single day, you’re going to get sick of it right? “but it’s good soup!” my parents/grandmothers say. “I’m still sick of it,” I say, to the consternation of everyone)


  * Xiao long bao = soup dumplings  
  

  * I asked one of my friends to help me with translating the two long paragraphs (when Chris is telling Li Laoshi why he’s no longer applying to study abroad in the summer), and we ended up doing 听写 (she dictated and I wrote it all down). I ended up remembering how to write way more Chinese than I thought I did (all those nights where I’d force myself to write Chinese characters over and over for at least two hours really paid off). I’d just like to take this moment to thank my muscle memory for the validasian


  * 加油 (jia you) from what Wei Laoshi says to Chris when Chris says he doesn’t want to minor in Chinese or study abroad anymore is not exactly “I’m cheering you on”—it’s pretty hard to translate so hopefully [this](http://blog.chinainternshipplacements.com/what-does-ji%C4%81y%C3%B3u-%E5%8A%A0%E6%B2%B9-mean-in-english-learn-chinese) helps with understanding what it means  
  

  * When Lardo graduated, Chris lost more than just a fellow teammate. He lost someone he looked up to, someone he could go to for help with general college things (how to get on a waitlist for a particular class, what experience does she have with certain professors, etc) and also with things like how to deal with a racist professor and how to navigate predominantly white spaces at college, etc, as well as commiserating together about those things  
  

  * “Frat bros for life” is a reference to Wong Fu Productions, who have their own [“Wong Fu for Life”](https://youtu.be/5A1jU5UNo0Y?t=558) (I borrowed their hand gesture), and they definitely watched WFP during their Youtube binges  
  

  * “hate-reads of nearby Asian restaurants’ Yelp reviews by white patrons” is a reference to [this post](http://whitepeopleyelpreviews.tumblr.com/post/127212692308/phropecy-gymleaderkyle-theloneookami), specifically: _“Service was great. Food was great. Couldn’t find parking” - 1 star_  
  

  * Hyperlinking things in the doc is way less annoying than doing it in the notes sections, I quite like that  
  

  * Thank you so much for taking the time to read all this I'm embarrassed at how long this ended up being al;dfjaskf



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> re: the incident w/ ms. enwhitled aka dex's mom--[little mix voice] this is a shout-out to the white parents [and students] at my alma mater to fucking do better lmao
> 
> pls reblog it [here](https://omgcphee.tumblr.com/tagged/see-me-fly-2) thank you!!! <3
> 
> p.s. huge thank-yous to my friends G, K, N, and S, who all patiently helped me with the chinese for this bc i remember nothing from my five semesters of college taking chinese. i got a headache while trying to write the dialogue for those and trying to gauge whether i could trust google translate on things i wasn't sure of. if there's anything that sounds off to you, it was def my mistake. pls lmk so i can change it bc i kept/keep changing things after giving my friends each a diff section to look over but then i didn't want to bother them to look over it like a 4th time two seconds after i just gave it to them a;dlfjk;dskl
> 
> p.p.s. also a huge thank-you to my mom and wikipedia for how to do chinese punctuation. i have some of it down (e.g., 6 dots for ellipses) but other things not so much (e.g., according to my mom, the way dialogue in chinese is written is like this--[someone says]: "___" but i didn't use the colon bc my dialogue tags are all in english and i don't think any of this advice was meant for ppl who are combining english and chinese in their writing anyway). but outside of the dialogue tags, if you spot something off wrt chinese punctuation, pls let me know! i am terrible at it
> 
> p.p.p.s. i am very aware that the way i write chowder is like... very ooc and it's bc i truly despise the way bitty infantilizes him in the comic (which is one of my triggers :/ ). but then i think about how the comic is in bitty's white infantilizing pov and it's like, how can we be so sure chowder is like that outside of bitty's white guy lens? maybe bitty's white guy lens makes him perceive chowder's behavior as being that of a child. and then i don't feel too bad about writing chowder so differently from his canonical portrayal ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> but also i tend to read his cheery exterior like [this](http://omgcphee.tumblr.com/post/156065967319/chowder-hc-depression%20rel=)
> 
> p.p.p.p.s. this is several months late, but it was meant to fulfill the "full moon" prompt from chowder week 2017
> 
> p.p.p.p.p.s. i know this thing was super long and meandered a lot but what i wanted for this chapter was for him to be all like "yep i can handle college now bc i went thru all that racism last yr and i’m also now an Aware person who knows about internalized racism and all that stuff", and then for him to find that actually, yeah, he does know about those things, but he still has to do the hard work of unlearning it and having all sorts of other realizations (realizasians). hopefully that got thru ad;lfk;jslkdf


End file.
